In the age of social media, more and more businesses and influencers are collaborating to share their following and give each other a leg up. This sounds like a win-win situation, but it’s important to be careful when choosing who you collaborate with and why. Here is an easy guide to small business collaboration.
How To Pick and Choose Small Business Collaborations
Do Your Brands Align?
This is the most important step of the entire process. When vetting small business collaborations, you need to be clear on what your brand represents so that you can avoid collaborating with the wrong people. If your brand is strictly vegan and holistic, you wouldn’t want your product to show up on a carnivore’s Instagram page.
Check Out Their Following
If your direct messages are blowing up with people who want to collaborate with you, the first metric you should be looking at is their followers, but more importantly how do they interact with their followers, what is their engagement like as this will help you to get a vibe of the person who wants to collaborate with you.
Review Their Content
Once they have passed the follower test, it’s time time to take a look at their posts. This will give you insight into who their audience is and what they like to see on their feed. You want to only choose collaborators who have a similar audience to your target audience. Reviewing their content will also highlight red flags of any content you don’t want to be associated with your business.
Don’t stop at their social media either. If they have a website, check it out and read their mission statement. If anything in their content or messaging doesn’t sit well with you or just doesn’t align with your brand, the collaboration isn’t for you.
What Are You Getting Back?
At the end of the day, a small business collaboration on social media is a business transaction. As such, you want to be sure that your collaborator will be living up to their end of the bargain. Ask yourself how you benefit from this collaboration. If you can’t come up with anything, there’s no point in collaborating.
Professionalism
Finally, never underestimate this importance of professionalism. Collaboration is a partnership. If you’re getting a rude or unprofessional vibe from someone, it could indicate difficulties down the line that you don’t have time for.
Small business collaborations are a great way to get some exposure for your brand, but they can also waste your time and hurt your reputation. Make sure you properly assess whether a collaboration is right for you before you dive in.
Remember to check out my business podcast Business and Life Conversations with Angela Henderson [with over 100 episodes], or my blog for more awesome articles, and connect with other small business owners by joining the Australian Business Collaborative.
Have an awesome day,
Ange
