As a small business your aim will most likely be to bloom and grow into a not-so-small business but, as this happens, you will need to include/hire more people to assist you in this process. This often may affect the way you manage your online presence and this is where it gets a little tricky.
As a company you need to maintain the tone, style and feeling of your online presence. In a way, it is related to my previous article:
Would your customers recognise your brand if your logo was not attached?
Would your customers recognise your brand if you were not managing it?
This is very important and can be the difference between your long-term success and failure.
You may consider preparing a manual to assist your employees in maintaining this giving them ideas of how to reply to customers, what kind of tweets/posts should be shared and what tone they should have BUT even more important than a manual is allowing your employees to catch the vision, helping them to get to know your clients and assisting them in building new relationships.
On top of this, I would recommend one more thing. Always have one way that your trusted clients can contact you and only you (or as you grow even bigger, your top management) – this could be an email account, a twitter account or Skype but make sure that you have a direct connection where you can be contacted.
Initially, you may do a lot of redirecting – i.e. contact “so and so” or cc-ing someone in an email but ultimately you want your customers/clients/fans to know that you are accessible if necessary and that they are valued.
What did you struggle with as your business grew or as it is growing? Share it in the comments below!