Even Small Businesses Need Help with Human Resources & Social Media

You’re never too small for growth and you’re never too small to launch initiatives to grow your business or to ask for help.

Two projects come to mind – human resources and social media. The former deals with your employees, considered by some your internal customers, and the latter pertains to your outreach, how your present your skills, goods and services to your external customers.

Human Resources

In today’s economy, small businesses have a great impact on America’s economic health and significantly contribute to the country’s gross domestic product. In 2016, 28.8 million small businesses’ contribution to the national economy stood at 99.7%. That same year, small businesses employed 56.8 million workers or 48% of all American employees.

Small business owners every day deal with a long to-do list of tasks and obligations, and they must wear many hats. As a result, small business owners are under painstaking pressure to find enough time in a day to rotate those hats and get their jobs done.

As practice has shown, very often small business owners put all their efforts into growing their businesses and revenues but they put little or no attention at all to have their human resources matters up to date and making sure that everything in their human resources area is in line with federal and local laws.

Frequently, many small business owners, after hiring the right person for the job, relegate human resources tasks to the bottom of their lists. All businesses have to have in place mechanisms for making all aspects of their companies work together successfully. Human resources management is one of the most vital areas of any business, even if the company has just one employee.

Human resources entail a lot more than just hiring the right people. HR engages many business segments – from people management to employee relations – and many points in between. Not paying attention to human resources could have the dire consequence and put the business and its owner at risk for legal consequences.

One of the common mistakes small business owners make is not thinking of the hiring process as a complex series of steps that are important for the company holistically and financially. The hiring process for small businesses should have the same components as hiring for a big company. It should start with recognizing hiring needs and then follow a clear job description.  A job description should include duties, responsibilities and other essential qualifications for the position.

Human resources management is probably one of the more complicated aspects of running a small business but it is vitally important to the existence of the business. Employees are one of a company’s greatest assets and it is absolutely fundamental to protect and manage those assets, according to regulations and set of laws.

Social Media

Social media have become the leading means for individual and group communications and networking, perhaps more than e-mail and traditional public relations. Of the major venues, such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., there are serious ones and frivolous ones, some favored by youth and others by adults and professionals. The best option, in my opinion, for businesses is a combination of Twitter, Facebook, the website, and traditional outreach venues like mail and press releases. I will discuss the important value of a blog later in this outline. The outcome of a well-planned and executed outreach campaign would be to establish the business and its management as thought leaders for customers, vendor-partners and other stakeholders.

A proactive outreach campaign won’t work without content. Consequently, in order for the company to be visible in cyberspace or the marketplace, it needs to create content, projects or ideas that could be promoted regularly. Regularity and frequency are fundamental principles of outreach and outreach. Content such as news, produces and services, ideas, observations, events, projects, goals and activities can then be disseminated by the social media.

Proactive outreach also can’t succeed without an audience. The organization must promote its social media and invite its members to participate via its regular mailed correspondence. Such an invitation with the appropriate logo can appear at the bottom of letters, statements, invoices and passbooks.

The institution’s management, with my assistance, would develop a series of events and other occasions that can be promoted and then re-promoted recurrently to promote the mission. Re-promoting and retweeting are important concepts because not all of your followers are on line at the same time so in order to reach as many people as possible, the content must be re-promoted, retweeted and re-posted several times a day with slight variations in the wording. This also teaches the audience to return regularly for more information. In that manner you build, cultivate and nurture of community that is interested in what you have to say.

The well-rounded outreach campaign includes Twitter, Facebook, website, blog, newsletters, etc.

Recent history has shown that serious and regular attention to social media have resulted in an increase in support and awareness about the mission, project or business. In other words, the small business can generate more leads and the nonprofit can attract more advocates. While social media may sound frivolous to some because of its prevalence among youth, it is a powerful marketing venue that must be used wisely by serious businesses and civic leaders. Infrequent or rare posts, tweets or updates after launching social media will confuse the cyber-audience and marketplace and cause unintended harm than intended good.

Frequency, regularity and consistency are keys to social media outreach success.

Visit our websites and contact us for guidance:

http://hrtiebreaker.com/

http://newhopepublishingllp.com/