Small businesses are getting creative on social media—and driving foot traffic

A chef at a small Mexican restaurant in Georgia flips a chicken and gets 1.2 million views. A real estate agent pretends to fall in a listing video and racks up a quarter of a million likes. A Chevy dealership spoofs The Office and draws the attention of the General Motors CEO.

Small businesses are using social media in increasingly creative ways on TikTok and beyond in an effort to catch people’s attention.

Judy Wang, the owner of Judy’s Family Cafe in Galesburg, Illinois, has become a local celebrity as a result of her social media marketing efforts. In her most viral TikTok, which has accumulated more than 10.5 million views and nearly a million likes since it was posted in August, she appears ominously on the side of the road, wearing tiny sunglasses, before she appears to teleport into a car to pitch the riders on trying the cafe’s pancakes. Since that video was posted, she said, the restaurant’s sales have increased 50%, with some customers coming from miles away.

“People come from all over town, from Chicago,” Wang told Marketing Brew. “We had our first customer from Tennessee drive for eight hours.”

As more small businesses create funny or educational content online, marketers told us that it can lead to an increase in foot traffic—and, it seems, even a shot at fame for the people working there.

Do I entertain you?

Wang told us that she first dipped her toe into social marketing with Facebook videos where she demonstrates how to make certain dishes, but she found that it didn’t drive the type of engagement she’d hoped for. So she began experimenting with humor, recruiting local agency Clear Profits Digital Marketing to help. Together, they brought Judy’s Family Cafe to Instagram and TikTok this summer and created the now-viral video of Wang wearing the glasses.

“There’s a little bit of pressure because we want to make sure we keep having the same type of views and going viral, and a lot of people expect her to be posting videos all the time,” Victor Dantas, co-owner and marketing specialist at Clear Profits Digital Marketing, told us. “I would say the creativity part is extremely important, as well as consistency.”

Dantas said the agency creates about eight videos per month with Judy’s Family Cafe, and they are looking to expand the cafe’s social presence to YouTube soon.

Clear Profits Digital Marketing isn’t the only agency working with small businesses on their social presence. In Austin, Texas, Flash Marketing works with local brick-and-mortar businesses ranging from auto-body shop Genuine Automotive to medical office Pain & Spine Physicians.

Much of the content that Flash creates with its clients is in a Q&A format, often using a tiny mic, and often involves employees sharing their expertise or opinions on things like a car they’d never buy or other topics trending on sites like Reddit, Michael Beltran, co-founder and CEO of Flash Marketing, told us.

Beltran said that kind of informative or entertaining content “aids in the ability to keep people on our videos as long as possible, which we feel is a big reason why a lot of them reach such high numbers of views, comments, and engagement.”

Caroline Murray, a content manager at Flash Marketing, said employee-led social content can help establish the business’s presence in the community. “Social media is about being authentic and being human, and the employees are the best way to show that,” she told us.

Get in the door

According to Beltran, Flash prefers to work only with companies that have physical locations because, he said, it creates rapport with customers and, ideally, the social content incentivizes them to come visit.

“We like to use their people [on social media] so that when their audience watches this stuff and then they go and visit their store location in person, there’s that built-in credibility, trust, and familiarity with the employees that are on camera,” Beltran said. “Those are the same employees that you’re going to see when you visit them in person.”

At Genuine Automotive, Murray said people will sometimes come in to see staffers and say, “Oh my gosh, I saw you on TikTok. That’s so cool.”

Earlier this summer, Grace Kerber, digital branding creator at Mohawk Chevrolet, an upstate New York dealership making The Office-like videos, told the newsletter Link in Bio that they’ve seen a bump in foot traffic as a result of their videos.

Wang, too, said more people are coming into her restaurant, and she said she gets a lot of people asking for pictures or for her to wear the instantly recognizable glasses.

“People want to come here, not only because of the food, but they want to see her, as well,” Dantas said. “They like her personality, so to have a face for the business is definitely important.”

The businesses are leaning in. Genuine Automotive hosts events to teach people skills like how to change tires and check their oil, which also gives people the opportunity to meet the social media stars in the process, Beltran said. Wang, meanwhile, has partnered with the Galesburg tourism office to help bring more people to town.

“We want to just show people you can come here for breakfast, and if you have time, you can go downtown,” she said. “We welcome all people.”

Perhaps one downside of going viral as a small business? Not everyone can feasibly be part of the fun.

“We get a lot of comments like, ‘Where are you? Oh no, I’m so far away,’” Murray said. “But at the end of the day, we aren’t mad about the extra exposure.”