Where big businesses struggle with social media is that their consumer base is large and very widespread, making connecting with individual customers and building relationships rather hard. In a smaller company it’s much easier to build up a rapport with your clientele, get to know who your regulars are and what they like and then really start building your brand community.

A great way to do this is through storytelling. Everyone has success stories about their business, and more often than not they’re simply sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. Now you have the perfect platform to let your patrons know about your successes, awards that you’ve won, and triumphs they might not otherwise have ever heard anything about.

Finding and sharing these stories in interesting ways is one of the first steps towards social media success for businesses. These stories help to humanise the company, creating a kinship with your readers, driving new purchases and in turn new stories.

How does your company or brand find out about success stories? And then how do you share them?

Okay so you’ve got yourself a Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, YouTube, Linkedin and countless other channels, now what? Having the attitude of ‘build it and they will come’ is not going to cut it here. Sure you’ll attract a few people but don’t you want to attract a whole LOAD of people instead? Don’t you want to have a community who interact with you AND each other? To reach consumers who have never thought of using your brand before and turn them in to loyal patrons and ambassadors of your channel?

The key word in all this is community. Community and interaction. But not just on your own network, it’s important, in fact integral to interact on other networks too, ones that are relevant to you and your brand. By making yourself a valued member of these other relevant communities you are in turn making your own brand voice prominent and heard. Do some research, find out where the conversations and feedback around your areas of interest, expertise or brand are and make sure you are seen and heard there as much as possible.

A good starting point is following the right people on Twitter or joining groups and fan pages on the likes of Facebook and Linkedin. Perhaps set up some Google alerts and start researching what RSS feeds to follow.

But don’t just be a voyeur. Join in with the conversation topics, start one of your own, post pictures and videos that add to these communities. In turn make yourself a valuable member of THEIR brand pages. Share content, share more content and just when you think you’ve shared all you can share a little bit more.

The most successful users of social media are not the ones spending all their time focusing solely on their own channels, they are the people who are contributing and collaborating on other people’s pages too. It’s time to give something back.