Recently, I was invited to present at a training morning on small business and social media. I’m always happy to help other small businesses and community organisations learn about the things I’ve picked up over the years, and, while presenting my case study as a business person who has used social media to get an audience and clients, I emphasised the idea of mutual support.

I talked mainly about retweeting on Twitter and also about the way I feature other small businesses in my “Small Business / Freelance Chat” posts on my blog. I also talked about how some editing colleagues (who I do NOT see as competitors) kindly shared some of my blog posts on various forums to which they belong, which helped a couple of my posts go “viral” (500 hits in a couple of days is a big deal to me).

So I just wanted to take a moment to mention some of the kind instances of support I’ve had from other people in the editing / small business community (and, of course, encourage you to look at their resources too).

Louise Harnby kindly featured my Word help posts as her Link of the Week recently. This and her weekly round-up which included it again have collected me over 40 hits on my own website/blog so far. Add to that a couple of entries on her weekly round-up post for others of my posts, and she’s sent over 50 visitors my way in the past month. Thanks, Louise!

The University of Kent Careers Service found my post on starting a career in proofreading and linked to it on their Careers in Publishing web page. I’ve had a few hits a day from that since that happened.

Editor colleague, Kathy O’Moore Klopf, who is a constant support and fount of information, often (make that usually) shares my links to posts made in Facebook and Twitter. She also shares them with other communities she’s in, via forums and other discussion areas. Of course, I do the same for her! She is one of the people who helped me to those 500 pageviews.

An editors’ forum called The Editor’s POV mentioned my Stress post in one of their weekly round-up articles, and quite a few people popped over to have a look.

And last week, Nicky Getgood from TalkAboutLocal featured me in an article about people who use Twitter, Facebook and other free tools for marketing, information sharing and awareness raising.

All of these different posts in different places give me …

• A new audience who may not have come across me yet
• The chance to help more people, as well as to market myself to them – both are truly equally important to me
• Link-backs, i.e. my URL on their page – Google likes these as they confirm that the site being linked to is valid and useful – so it helps me in their search results

And all this is on top of the retweeting and Facebook sharing – I’ve explained elsewhere why that is important to small businesses.

So, thank you to everyone who’s talked about me on their websites, here is some mutual support back, and if you have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a website or blog, do share other people’s resources – it’s really worthwhile and can make a friendly small business person very happy!