Not to start off this post by pointing fingers, but chances are, you’re being at least a little self-centered.

OK. Or maybe a lot self-centered.

NOT that you are intentionally doing so, but it just sort of happens to a lot of small business owners.

We small business owners know we have some really awesome stuff that can help some really awesome people have a better life/more successful career/reach a really awesome goal. And because of that, we tend to put us in front of them.

That’s right – the 1 big thing (too) many of us are missing in our social media strategy and execution is putting our customers first.

We do things like send auto-DMs….even though most Twitter users can’t stand them.

We do things like direct tweet at people we don’t really have a relationship with…asking them to follow a link to our website or online store.

We do things like send private messages or post on fan pages of those that we don’t really have a connection, leaving a link and some (hopefully) intriguing text…in hopes they will like us or follow us.

We post status updates and put the link in the comments area…even though that makes it a LOT harder on our customers to actually get to the thing we NEED them to get to most!

We forget that so very many social media and website visits are now via mobile devices…and haven’t adapted what we are doing to accommodate those changing user behaviors.

We craft article titles with the most “creativity” (i.e. outrageous, eye-catching, must-click-now-ness) we can muster in hopes of garnering the most pageviews…even though it may mean we aren’t properly representing the content included on that page.

We include Contact forms (only) on our websites in order to capture email addresses for our CRM database…even though some prospective customers really prefer to call us on the phone or email us directly.

We require too many fields to be completed on our Contact forms because we want to gather as much info as possible…even though the higher the number of required fields, the higher the number of people who leave the page without submitting their entry.

We hire someone to design a really beautiful website for us…without *also* considering that those grossly-oversized yet gorgeous images are pushing our most-searched-for information to much less desirable and easy to find places.

So while – yes – capturing email addresses, gaining followers, getting sign-ups for our newsletters, and increasing our Facebook engagement levels is best for us as small business owners, we aren’t necessarily making it as easy or convenient as possible for our customers and potential customers to do business with us.

We small business owners need to maintain the crucial balance between what we’d most prefer to do and what our customers are reasonably willing to put up with.