The Art of Small Business Social Media

Starred review from October 1, 2024
Best-selling author Fitzpatrick (The Art of Social Media, 2014, with Guy Kawasaki) delivers a new book on social media focusing on promoting small businesses. Her experience includes partnering with brands like TJMaxx and serving as the first head of social strategy for the online platform Canva. Readers will be guided from the ground up in this easy-to-read book broken into three sections. The first covers social media for small businesses, the second focuses on captivating audiences, and the third provides a blueprint for a successful online presence. Fitzpatrick breaks down the numerous social media platforms, like Facebook and TikTok, and their demographics, helping readers select the appropriate channels to use as just one piece of their overall marketing plan. She gives tips on how to craft a brand identity, whether or not to do your own social media marketing, and how to find your ideal customer. The book also includes a case study approach for putting it all in action and a list of apps and services. Whether they are selling to business or consumers, small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and any others who are interested in socializing their products or services will find this guide appealing and supremely useful.

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November 18, 2024
In this ho-hum manual, marketing professional Fitzpatrick (coauthor of The Art of Social Media) provides guidance for small companies to promote themselves on social media. She recommends that those unfamiliar with socials focus on mastering one platform before adding others to the mix. Content should “solve problems, entertain, inform, or be helpful to your community,” she contends, suggesting that a surf shop might provide “tips on how to select the best surfboard for different types of waves.” Providing ideas for creating videos to share, Fitzpatrick notes that readers could, for instance, take viewers behind the scenes of the company’s day-to-day operations or answer frequently asked questions about a topic related to their business. Elsewhere, Fitzpatrick encourages using attention-grabbing headlines, incorporating humor, and engaging with one’s audience by responding “promptly and authentically to comments and direct messages.” Such advice is sensible if a bit obvious, and because the case studies that conclude the volume are fictional, it’s unclear if the suggested strategies would have the supposed effects. (For instance, Fitzpatrick’s contention that a dry cleaner’s call for customers to “share photos of themselves in their favorite sweaters” would create a 40% increase in engagement feels like an overestimate of the likelihood that customers would participate.) The result is a mixed bag.