I am often asked at local networking events –  ’what is the benefit of social media for my business? Quickly followed with ’Will I make any money out of it?’, and ‘When will it start to work?’

Many online marketing pro’s (including me) preach about how social is important, but for the smaller local business who don’t have the resources or the knowledge, this is a very real question, especially when there are many articles floating around suggesting that if you get an intern to do your social, you may be committing brand suicide.

Small local businesses want hard facts and figures as to how much money social might make and how long it will take to see results, so I thought I’d do an experiment on a local level to see just how much reach there might be with a ‘bit of social‘ and publish the results. Hopefully you will see that we got more than great content, we made some fantastic local connections and became part of the festival itself. You may also think differently about short term Social Media for events as just the starting point as opposed to the beginning and the end.

If nothing else, I hope this post can show you how simple ideas can be put together and that thinking of what to tweet is not as hard as it seems when you are surrounded by shareable content! (more…)