Danielle McDougald spent years running The Virtual Helping Hand without telling her own social media followers it existed. Her personal page was pictures of flowers. Her business stayed tucked in the background, growing through word of mouth while she quietly avoided mentioning it at all. Then in 2023, something clicked. Here’s what changed, and the social media strategy she now teaches her own clients.
Why Small Business Owners Need a Social Media Strategy
Danielle calls social media a visual resume. Before anyone works with you, they Google you. They look for reviews, they check what you post, they decide in seconds whether you’re worth a reply. A real social media strategy for small business owners isn’t about posting constantly. It’s about giving a stranger enough to trust you before they’ve ever spoken to you.
The Three Content Pillars Danielle Swears By
Every client’s content calendar gets built around the same three social media content pillars: engagement, education, and promotion. Engagement posts ask a question specific enough to make someone stop scrolling. Educational posts prove you know what you’re talking about before a client ever books a call. Promotional posts are the ones people avoid, but Danielle is direct about it: if you never say you’re open for business, no one will know to ask. These are the types of social media posts she rotates through for every client, in that order of frequency.
How Hashtags and Algorithms Work, Platform by Platform
Danielle treats Instagram hashtags for small business accounts like keywords. If someone searches a term on Instagram and your post is tagged with it, you show up. LinkedIn works differently. Hashtags barely matter there. What matters is the actual topic language in your caption, and how many first-degree connections you have on your personal profile, since business pages rarely get pushed to new audiences. Facebook is its own animal. Hashtags don’t work there anymore either, and putting a link directly in a caption gets a post buried, since Facebook wants people to stay on the platform. Danielle’s workaround: put the link in the comments instead, and share your own business posts to your personal profile to help the algorithm see early engagement.
The Year She Stopped Hiding Her Business
For the first few years, Danielle kept The Virtual Helping Hand almost entirely off her personal social media. She names three reasons: fear of what people from her personal life would think, fear of being judged by people further along in the industry, and a flat lack of confidence in calling herself a business owner. The shift came in 2023, when she realized that if someone she’d just met tried to look her up, they’d find Danielle, not the business. Nothing would connect. She started posting about the business, showing up at networking events, and building business confidence in public instead of behind the scenes. She uses affirmations to get there. Before she had a team, she started saying she had one. She said she was highly sought after before a single client had told her that. Saying it daily, she says, made her start noticing and pursuing the opportunities that matched it. The result: when people think of Danielle now, they think of The Virtual Helping Hand, the same way people think of Amazon when they think of Jeff Bezos.
What The Virtual Helping Hand Offers
What began as one favor during the early days of COVID, helping a friend with admin and social media, has grown into a full-service virtual assistant business. The Virtual Helping Hand now handles admin support, social media strategy and management, operations and funnel setup, CRM management, website design as an official Wix partner, email marketing, and branding and graphic design. If your own brand could use that same kind of attention, that’s exactly the kind of work we dig into with clients through our branding services in Morris County.
Audio Production
Huge thanks to Mike at Nielsen Audio Solutions for editing this episode. If you have a podcast and you are doing your own editing because you cannot find someone you trust, Mike is the answer. He has been editing every episode of This Might Get Creative and the difference shows. Reach out to him at nielsenaudiosolutions.com
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