This is probably the most often used contradiction to objection we hear from businesspeople against telling on their company pages the inner workings about their business.

Of course there is or might be some commercial secret like may be your extra cheap supplier of the same quality supply material nobody knows about, ok, don’t tell about this!

But when it’s not the real secret, do not mind telling about it if it makes a decent story about your company, and it may show your company as experts.

For example, you may do some certain quality control measure to ensure the materials you receive will ‘translate’ into high quality product. Ok, why not to tell about this? Let me give you an example – in the form of template – so this is the compressed scheme of your imaginative article:

“The leather which your shoe is made of, makes about 80% of total ‘quality’ of your shoe. There are other components, but if the leather is bad, your shoe is either, however crafty the shoemaker was. Because of that we introduced a strict control on all leather that we buy. When we receive new supply, our quality control specialist does the following:

1. (insert here whatever he actually does) – this is to ensure that (insert here the customer benefit)
2. then our specialist (does something else) and from that we find out if it is really ok for (some production process or operation)
3. and finally our specialist takes it to the storage room and puts it (in some special way) which ensure it is not losing its quality while being stored.

Ok, it was totally imaginative as I have no idea how shoemakers do that. But look, if you add a bit more details into that, some photos to show good and bad examples, it will translate into fairly interesting article.

If the person has some interest in shoes, like I do, it would be very interesting read for him. AND it also shows your company as experts. It is one of the little drops to form in the customer mind the perception of ‘these guys know what they’re doing’.

Many people I consulted to on social media management are very cautious about this approach. They’re afraid that people (their potential customers) might just do what they sell themselves. Ok, shoemaking is probably wrong example for that as one wouldn’t want to try to make a production quality shoes for oneself. But in other cases like plumbing, car servicing etc – will the customers try to make something themselves instead of calling for professional help? In my opinion, hardly so!

Ok, there might be some small percentage of DIY-type of people, they just love doing stuff with their own hands. But they already know how to change oil in their cars. And such people are not your potential customers anyway.

Vast majority are completely different, they don’t want to know how to change oil in their cars, nor they want to learn or get their hands dirty. They just need the oil to be changed or some other task just to be done and they’re ready to pay for that. And in this case, when your car service business posts an article about the difference between the kinds of car oil, it might just create another drop of proofing that you know what you’re doing, you’re an expert.

When you tell more and more such stories to your subscribers, they start to grow and understanding within them – ‘there are so many not so obvious things here, I better let some pro do that stuff’.

And who is the pro? May be that company whose articles I just see like every week in my social feed? They seem to know what they’re doing!

So that’s exactly the point, by telling people about inner workings of your company, about how things are done, some how-tos you’re actually building your image as pro company and warming up your subscribers to become one day your new customers.