Cream Cruiser doesn’t sell ice cream from a classic brick-and-mortar nor a jingle-touting truck. This business slings scoops from a bicycle. Knowing a bike is an easy way to access commuters, tourists, and pedestrians, Katherine O’Brien launched her business selling treats on wheels in Baltimore, Maryland.
But her two-wheel delivery system isn’t the only novelty that set her business aflame. By expanding her promotion to social media, O’Brien turned her Instagram page into a cheeky hide-and-seek game for viewers.
“I’d post on Instagram, and people would be like, ‘Oh, where can I find her next?’ sort of thing. ‘What event can I find her at?’” she told the Daily Dot in an interview. “So I was definitely using it to advertise, but very differently, like on a much smaller scale than I do now.”
Many others have taken similar approaches to O’Brien, including Kristel Oreto, the owner of Now and Forever Tattoo in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Jeff Browne, co-founder of Heartwork Brewing in Bloomington, Indiana.
Social media is becoming the face and personality of small businesses. By promoting themselves online, their brick-and-mortar businesses take off outside of their typical locale.
By the numbers
TikTok has proven to be a top platform for small businesses to build their consumer base. In the app’s 2024 Economic Impact Report, TikTok found that it drove $15 billion in revenue for U.S. small businesses in 2023, and businesses reported an 88% increase in sales after promoting themselves on TikTok.
In the same report, the results show the food and beverage sector experienced the largest impact from TikTok, which supported a $6.4 billion contribution to GDP and 73,000 jobs in 2023. The second-largest impact on GDP and employment was from small businesses in health and wellness, followed by business services.
Just under half (45%) of small business owners say a meaningful portion of their business’ success is directly attributable to their TikTok marketing efforts. And nearly half (49%) agree or strongly agree that their business has benefited indirectly from the exposure on TikTok in the last year.
TikTok has grown in popularity over the last five years. In 2020, the number of TikTok users worldwide grew by 58.6%, to surpass the 1 billion milestone. By 2023, the number of users had risen to 1.92 billion.
That’s why businesses see TikTok as an integral part of their advertising and marketing plans.
More than half (55%) agree or strongly agree that TikTok is an important tool for reaching potential customers and growing their business. A similar proportion of respondents say their business needs to continue to use and improve upon TikTok marketing content to stay competitive (53%).
Turning to social media
While small businesses have taken advantage of social media since its inception, social platforms are now a primary place for them to promote their business, themselves, and their brand.
Kristel Oreto, the owner of Now and Forever Tattoo in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said that when she opened her own business after 25 years in the industry, she knew she had to use social media to promote it.
“As soon as TikTok started and the shop was opened, there was an account. And the same thing with Reels—as soon as Reels started, we started making them,” she told the Daily Dot in an interview.
Oreto draws in business online by hosting giveaways and posting code words that customers can bring in to get discounts in-store. “We also get people that stop our shop manager Jules all the time, because she’s the main face on the Reels and the TikToks,” she said.
Isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic led many more businesses to turn online. Katherine O’Brien, while using social media since she first began her ice cream bike business in 2015, revamped her account after realizing that humanizing herself and her business would lead to more success.
“I think during COVID is when I really realized how Reels and putting yourself out there and being vulnerable on social media—I needed help from the community to survive,” O’Brien said. “So I started being OK with being vulnerable at the time, and that’s sort of when the Reels came into play, with sharing my story and really putting myself out there.”
The shift in social media
The rise in influencer culture has forced businesses to change how they use social media. And using internet personality for marketing has proven to be successful, especially for O’Brien.
When O’Brien was first growing her Instagram account, she was simply posting pictures of her products or events.
“It wasn’t as much [of] me being the business owner,” O’Brien said. “Versus now, whether I’m on my Bike Business Instagram or my Cream Cruiser Instagram, it’s more [of] me telling a story versus trying to sell my products, essentially.”
A business’ internet personality is an important part of getting customers to buy your product because it helps them feel connected to you and the business, O’Brien said.
Jeff Browne, co-founder of Heartwork Brewing, also emphasized the importance of creating a personal brand. As workers become internet micro-celebrities, customers develop a relationship with them—sometimes before they’ve even attended the place. Additionally, social media helps businesses reach audiences they typically wouldn’t be able to reach.
“We’ve been getting people coming into the bar saying, like, ‘Oh, I saw you in that Reel,’ mentioning it to our staff, which is great,” Browne told the Daily Dot. “‘Cause obviously—I think we’re at almost four million views now, for that—so the reach has gone far beyond our normal customer base.”
People even come in and mention specific videos that had little engagement compared to others, Browne said.
So, who’s doing the work?
When it comes to managing the business and the business’s socials, most owners end up wearing several hats—and sometimes the employees do, too.
For Browne and the rest of Heartwork Brewing, it’s a highly collaborative process.
“It’s all done in-house,” he confirmed. “I mentioned—I try to take care of most of the still images and photography, but everything is a collaboration with our staff. I’m always asking for ideas, and so this specific [viral] video was found by someone in our staff named Liv.”
The video in question shows a staff member pretending to be a customer, asking to “get $5 on pump two.” Another staff member behind the counter responds, “What?” The video then cuts to the “customer” lying under one of the beer taps, mouth open, while the staff member pulls the handle. Other members of the brewery’s staff laugh behind the camera as beer overflows out of her mouth, and the video cuts off.
As of publication, the Reel is Heartwork’s highest-performing video, with over 181,000 likes on Instagram.
Browne, who has a background in photography, originally intended to focus on posting photographs of the brewery and its lager. However, as TikTok grew as a medium, collaboration between the founders and the younger staff naturally grew along with it. Making Instagram Reels for Heartwork is more of a casual co-worker collaboration than an official team requirement.
“We have a group chat with everyone on our staff, so [Liv] just sent it to the group chat one day—I don’t even think it was a suggestion of something we should do, just as something she found funny,” Browne recounted. “But I thought it was a good idea to take it and run with it. And so, yeah, it’s absolutely a group effort with the ideas and with the execution.”
Oreto, whose tattoo studio consists of several independent artists with their own personal brands and careers, approached social media somewhat differently.
“There is definitely a strategy—I hired a marketing speaker last year to come in and speak to my whole staff of 15 people to explain to them how to use social media to benefit their own careers and business as a whole,” Oreto said. The way she sees it, the more informed everyone is about social media promotion, the better they do both individually and as a unified business.
Oreto is unfazed by the ever-shifting, all-encompassing social media landscape. She’s been using social media to advertise her work since MySpace, so she’s familiar with the ebb and flow of online algorithms. What might be a new frontier for some business owners is, to her, the same thing with a new title.
While Now & Forever doesn’t have an official social media manager, their shop manager, Julianne “Jules” Miele, runs most of it. Between Miele, Oreto, the shop’s team of artists, and a loyal base in the Philadelphia community, Now & Forever has managed to carve out a decent niche in the content sphere.
“We’re using my tricks, the marketing instructor’s tricks, and then the staff just being great as a whole. We have a group chat where everybody just sends Reels and TikToks that they like,” Oreto said.
Many of Now & Forever’s videos are popular TikTok or Instagram audios over tattoo-related jokes or skits. Miele also posts a lot of straightforward footage of artists’ work and customers’ finished tattoos. Oreto said that clients are usually open to being in videos, and they often get clients specifically because of videos. Sometimes clients even recognize Miele from her frequent appearances on the shop’s TikTok page.
“We have artists that volunteer to be in the videos, but we also have Jules just walking up and being like ‘Hey!’ to a client, asking them if they mind being in a social media post for the day,” Oreto said. “Mostly everybody says yes, they love it, and it’s always something fun.”
Both Oreto and Browne have fully-staffed businesses, with storefronts and people to interact with and bounce ideas off of. The very nature of O’Brien’s Cream Cruiser, on the other hand, requires her to be both a one-woman business owner and content machine.
O’Brien tries to post several Reels a day alongside running her Cream Cruiser, her online courses, and her e-commerce store. Most of her posts talk about her journey as an independent business owner, and sometimes how others can do the same thing. She acknowledges that for some, the online grind and demand for authenticity and vulnerability can be detrimental, but she personally doesn’t feel that way.
“[Personal branding] adds a little bit more work, but I also think it’s fun, too,” O’Brien said. “Like, one of my favorite parts—and this even goes back to my farmer’s market days—one of my favorite parts of this business has always been sharing my story. So, it hasn’t been a struggle for me.”
When asked if she’d ever look into getting a social media manager, O’Brien is unsure, as her business’s branding is so centered around her personality.
“It’s obviously like, I’m gonna tell my story the best. But then there’s more so the behind-the-scenes stuff that I could see myself bringing somebody on to help,” she explained.
She does use automatic DMs, but even that feels too impersonal sometimes. “I think I would prefer everything to be as much human interaction as possible, but it’s extremely hard the more you grow,” O’Brien said.
Looking toward the future
As evidenced by the rapid rise of TikTok over the past four years, the social media landscape is constantly evolving, and it can be difficult to keep up.
“We’re all learning as we go with this, since we’re still so brand new,” Browne said. “And I think, in this day and age, y’know, video content is king. It’s sort of shifted from images into video—into Reels, or to TikToks, however you want to call it.”
Social media trends may be difficult to stay on top of and add yet another responsibility to the shoulders of managers, but social media is still a huge boon in terms of low-cost, independent marketing. It can keep local businesses afloat, and even make them global.
“Of course going viral helps all businesses,” Oreto stated. “The end goal is just to make sure that the shop is always flourishing, all the artists are always fully booked, and that we’re more of a destination tattoo shop.”
Because of TikTok, Oreto’s small indie tattoo studio in Philadelphia can be a destination tattoo shop. Now, any person can be a business, and any business can reach everyone. O’Brien, a woman running multiple businesses entirely on her own, sees this opportunity and urges people to act on it.
“One thing I just wanna shout from the rooftops is: Anybody who’s already active on social media, regardless of what you’re using it for—I am just more and more blown away by the opportunities to monetize social media,” she said. “It’s like, you’re already spending the time on it. I just encourage every single person out there to incorporate some kind of monetization into the time they’re spending on it, because it’s pretty unreal what the internet is capable of.”
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