Social media has become the great equalizer. We’ve all heard of amazing stories where small businesses have pulled off a great campaign on Facebook, Twitter or the like and gained local, national, or even worldwide attention. They have just as much potential to do this as any big business does.

But this equal battle ground is only that way if you make it. Big businesses got that way by shrewdly managing their time and coming up with great ideas for themselves. The success didn’t happen by accident, and there are several things you can learn from how they manage themselves on Facebook.

Making Customers Feel Special

Big businesses are actually at a certain disadvantage when it comes to online presence. Their potential customers know that they’re a big corporation looking to get more business from being online. Immediately there’s a level of distrust there from people who don’t like being marketed to by “the man.”

Companies that succeed, then, know that winning people over one by one is the way to go. You want to make every single person feel special. This involves responding to every question, request, and message, going out of your way to help those in need, and monitoring your audience to see what they want to see rather than what YOU want to see.

Is your small business doing this? If not, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage, one that will be surely pounced upon by a larger company.

Creating Content, Not Just Sharing It

Your big business counterparts have a lot of time to focus on making their own material. You try to do this as well, but sometimes you’d rather just post up a cool link you found and be done with it so you can get back to making and selling items.

The problem with this is you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to keep the ball rolling with your customers. If they know you’re producing your own blog posts and other content, they’ll keep coming back. If you continue to repost other links, they may just decide to follow the source of your links rather than you.

Reposting something once in a while is fine, don’t get me wrong. But you absolutely should come up with content you can create on your own time as well.

Stick to a Schedule

Another super-fancy but not-really-fancy thing your big business competitors and colleagues can do is come up with a schedule for everything they do. This includes when to respond to certain emails, go to lunch (we see you eating a sandwich while packaging your latest order for shipment!), and yes, post on Facebook.

While this helps with filling out your Timeline and appearing active, the most important thing this develops is consistency. Your readers begin to understand you’re going to post every day/every other day/etc. and depend on that. If your content is also interesting enough they will look forward to you posting.

Eventually it will be ingrained in them you’re a dependable company. If you’re able to organize your social media, it will appear to others that your whole company is organized…even if you’re currently eating a sandwich while boxing up product.

What big business practice do you try to emulate on Facebook?

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (http://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab three ebooks, including My Facebook Formula, a free report on Facebook and why you should be using the largest social network for your business, here: http://www.ereleases.com/offer/freebooks.html