Social media for local business, without the noise

Social media advice for small businesses tends to come in one of two flavours: "you must be on every platform, posting every day", or "social media is a waste of time". Neither is much help to someone running a bakery in Timaru or an electrical business in Whangārei.

A more useful starting point is to treat social channels as places where some of your customers already spend time, and to show up there in a way that is cheap to sustain. This note covers choosing channels, what to post, and the New Zealand rules that apply once social media turns into email and text messages.

Choose one or two channels, not five

The right channel is the one your customers use and you can keep up with. A rough guide:

• Facebook remains where many New Zealand community groups, local buy-and-sell pages and older customers spend time. It suits trades, hospitality and local retail.
• Instagram suits businesses with something visual to show: food, interiors, gardens, fashion, before-and-after work.
• LinkedIn suits business-to-business services, professional practices and recruiting.
• YouTube suits anything where showing beats telling, such as how a product works or what a job involves. Videos can also turn up in ordinary search results.

If you cannot post at least a couple of times a month on a channel, it is better not to open an account there. An abandoned page with a last post from three years ago tells customers you might have closed.

Post what only you can post

The posts that work for small businesses are rarely polished. They are specific and real.

• A photo of today's work, with a sentence on what the job involved.
• An answer to a question a customer asked this week.
• A short note when something changes: hours over the holidays, a new service, a supplier delay.
• Something about your town or street that your customers will recognise.

What tends not to work: generic stock images with motivational quotes, reposted memes, and content that could have come from any business anywhere. If a post would make sense with a competitor's logo on it, it is not doing much for you.

Social media is not your website

Platforms change their rules, reach and features without asking you. Pages get restricted, groups get closed, and accounts get locked when the only person with the password leaves. Keep the important information (services, prices, hours, contact details) on your own website, and use social channels to point people there. Make sure at least two trusted people can access each business account.

When posts turn into messages

Sooner or later social media becomes a list: people who entered a competition, signed up for a newsletter, or messaged you for a quote. Sending marketing to that list brings New Zealand law into play.

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 is the anti-spam law. It covers commercial messages sent by email, text, instant messaging and similar channels. The Department of Internal Affairs enforces it and boils compliance down to three steps.

Consent. You need permission to send commercial messages. Express consent is the clearest: the person actively said yes, for example by ticking an unticked box. The law also recognises inferred consent, based on an existing relationship, and deemed consent, where someone has published their address in a business capacity without saying they do not want marketing. Inferred and deemed consent are narrower than many people assume, so express consent is the safe default. If you are challenged, it is up to you to show consent existed, so keep a record of how and when each person signed up.

Identify yourself. Each message must say clearly who authorised it and how to contact them.

Unsubscribe. Each message must include a working, free way to opt out, and requests must be honoured within five working days.

The Act does not cover voice telemarketing. It does cover the text message you send from your phone to past customers announcing a sale, which catches out many small businesses.

Privacy applies too

Names, phone numbers and email addresses collected through social media are personal information under the Privacy Act 2020. The Privacy Commissioner's principles cover collecting only what you need for a stated purpose, telling people why you are collecting it, keeping it secure and not using it for unrelated purposes. A competition entry form that quietly adds people to a marketing list fails on more than one count.

A sustainable weekly rhythm

• One or two posts on your main channel, built from real work or real questions.
• Reply to comments and messages within a day or two.
• Once a month, look at which posts led to enquiries or website visits, and do more of that.

That is enough for most small businesses. Consistency beats volume, and it is far easier to keep up.