“For mash, get smash” — Penny’s marketing masterclass at Ingroup.

Social media that works: Penny’s guide for small businesses

At this week’s Ingroup meeting, Penny from Pink Spaghetti gave a ten-minute talk that started with a question she’d been asked by a newly launched local business: “We’re booked up for months. Do we even need social media?”

It’s a fair question, and her answer was refreshingly practical.

Marketing is about being remembered, not about selling today

Penny got the room shouting out ad slogans from forty years ago — the kind everyone still knows by heart. None of those ads were designed to send you straight to the shops. They were designed so that when you eventually needed the product, one brand popped into your head first. Social media does the same job, just on a smaller, more local scale.

People are checking you out — quietly

Most people looking at your page never like or comment. They’re forming an opinion without you ever knowing they were there. A website is fairly static; social media tells them you’re still trading, still professional, still the right fit. And if you have no page at all, the algorithm helpfully shows them a competitor instead.

Where businesses get stuck

Penny identified three common traps: having no presence at all, setting a page up and abandoning it (a post from four years ago raises real doubts), and the feast-or-famine cycle of posting like mad when work is quiet and going silent when it’s busy.

What actually works

Show the work — before, during and after. Show your team; people buy from people. Share reviews, tips and how-tos. And above all, be consistent. One decent post a week for a year beats fifteen brilliant posts in a fortnight followed by nothing.

And if you don’t want to do it?

The platforms are free — the cost is time. Do it yourself in an hour a week, outsource parts of it, or hand the lot over. Or decide you genuinely don’t need it. Just make that an informed decision rather than an accident.