Jennifer, tell me about your role at ShareFile.

I started at ShareFile in August 2010 as an intern, while I was still in school. I loved the company culture from day one. After starting out in sales operations, I received the opportunity to transition to the marketing side of things, which I thoroughly enjoy. I currently manage social media for ShareFile, so if you’ve tweeted @ us or commented on our Facebook page, I probably responded to you. Oh by the way, I’m the only female on a team full of males (feel sorry for me now).

Why is social media so important to ShareFile?

Social media helps us engage with our customers, provide customer support, educate our prospects, and enhance awareness about our brand. Some of our customers really like to communicate via social sites like Twitter and Facebook and we are able to share the latest ShareFile news, product releases and other valuable content to our followers. We are extremely customer centric so social media allows us to build relationships (and be social, which we love) with our followers by engaging in conversation.

What are some of the social media sites ShareFile uses?

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
YouTube

Do you have different strategies for each of the social media sites?

Yes, we use Twitter to produce real-time valuable content to our followers that is quick to read and easy to engage with. We use Facebook to engage in lengthier conversations, post pictures from events, entertain our fans and let them in on the latest ShareFile happenings. Our LinkedIn profile is linked (ha, no pun intended) to the ShareFile blog and is also used to post job opportunities. Followers are able to share feedback and recommend and share some of our tools with others.

How do you measure a successful post?

We have this super cool tool called Argyle Social, which we use to measure the results. Using Argyle, we are able to pinpoint which posts strategies are most successful for us. We also measure the success of a post by the number of engagements by our followers. We strive to produce meaningful content that our audience wants to engage with.

We have a lot of business customers. Do you have any advice for them to start a social media campaign or improve upon their current social media efforts?

Social media is a huge deal. If your business isn’t currently present on any social site, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. There are more than 800 million active users on Facebook and over 200 million users on Twitter. What to do? Simple, get social. Just because you may not have a business profile on social sites doesn’t mean your brand isn’t being talked about already. When making a purchasing decision, people look to their social networks for advice so you want to be there to respond. You first want to figure out what you want social media to do for your business (enhance brand awareness, build a community, protect brand reputation, etc). When starting a social media campaign (if you’re starting from scratch), my advice is to research your audience and then identify which social platform best suits your business.

You should also take into consideration starting with the social network that you are most familiar with (there are social do’s and don’ts so you want to make sure you are adhering these). Using social media is not just about being on a social platform like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but actually being social. Use it as a communication device- talk and listen to your audience. The amount of hours dedicated to the social site(s) you chose really depends on your business, but if you’re just starting out, try dedicating even a few minutes per day to being social. Overtime, it may be a good idea to set aside more time per day/week or even schedule your posts through social media dashboards like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, or Argyle Social (my favorite). Once your business has established a presence on a social networking, try expanding onto various other platforms.

Be sure to follow Jennifer on Twitter.

Here are a few of the most recent articles I found interesting.

Beyond the Basics: Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts: Local Raleigh marketing and PR veteran Brian McDonald interviews Gregory Ng from Brooks Bell Interactive about how to effectivly use Twitter to manage multiple accounts. This is a very relevant topic for many businesses as they struggle to understand the quickly changing social media landscape.

How to Work in an Office: 37Signals founder Jason Fried presented at a recent TedX event on why the office isn’t a good place to get work done.

Newsletter segmented testing increases clicks by 40%: Brooks Bell Interactive has an amazing case study on how segmented testing can help increase the click-thru-rate of newsletters. Some great information is included. (Case study requires name and email for access).

Gowalla Turns the Tables, Integrates With Foursquare: Location based marketing tool Gowalla has updated and added the ability to check-in using Facebook Places and Foursquare as well as their own service. While location based tools are gaining an increased use, businesses (both b2b and b2c) are struggling to figure out a way for the service to drive sales.

Q&A with McDonald’s Director of Social Media Rick Wion: A Q&A with the McDonald’s social media director.

According to Wikipedia, the odds of being struck by lightning over the course of a lifetime are about 1 in 3,000.

Assuming that lightning strikes are independent events, the chances of getting struck by lightning 7 times in one lifetime are about 1 in about 2.2 trillion trillion (that second trillion is not a typo, the number is really that big). Despite incomprehensibly long odds, this is exactly what happened to a man named Roy Sullivan between the years of 1942 and 1977.

Granted, Sullivan was a Park Ranger in Virginia and spent quite a bit of time outdoors, but my point is that the world is a very big place and highly improbable events happen all the time. The law of large numbers says that with a big enough sample, many highly improbable events are bound to occur, like when a woman won the New Jersey lottery twice in a span of four months (odds are about one in 17 trillion). Or like when a college student coded a web site that now has over 500 million users and is worth upwards of 20 billion dollars. The name of this (former) college student is Mark Zuckerberg and the company is, of course, Facebook.

I am not trying to take away all of the credit from Mark Zuckerberg and his team. Just like Roy Sullivan increased his chances of being hit by lightning because he worked as a Park Ranger, Zuckerberg increased his chances of hitting the entrepreneurial jackpot through his intellectual prowess and unbridled ambition. The law of large numbers definitely deserves its fair share of credit for Facebook’s success, though, and every decade seems to produce a couple of companies with Facebook’s level of success. Even if you reject my premise about the role of chance in Facebook’s success and claim that Mark Zuckerberg’s superhuman business acumen provides a sufficient explanation, the fact remains that Facebook is a rare exception to the general rules of business.

Because of Facebook’s status as one of the shining examples of meteoric business success in the past 10 years, naturally many entrepreneurs will look at Facebook’s business model and company history as an example of what to do. I wish there was a way to put a “Don’t try this at home” disclaimer on their business model just like you see before every episode of the Jackass TV show. Unfortunately Facebook will be used as a retort to criticisms about flimsy business models for many years to come.

But why is Facebook such a bad example to follow, you may ask? There are several aspects of Facebook’s business model and path to success that are not easily replicable and if emulated will most often lead a business straight into the ground.

In the late 1990’s, there was a proliferation of internet businesses built on the notion of “eyeballs.” The idea was that if you build something cool, no business model was necessary. All you needed to do was drive enough people (as measured by page impressions, or eyeballs as they are sometimes known) to your web site and you could make money via advertising.

The problem with companies that have free business models is that they are often indistinguishable from companies with no business model at all, or companies that have a model but just a very bad one. Unfortunately with business models that are built on a free service, it is very difficult to tell that the business model is bad until the company is relatively mature (after all, you can’t use revenue or profitability as a sign of the health of your business) and so failures of this type of business are often of the more spectacular sort.

And because free services usually can’t survive “in the wild” during their early years, they need some other form of sustenance. Thus these services typically give rise to our second deadly sin of entrepreneurship: the need for large amounts of outside funding.

Facebook has raised over $850MM in funding.

Raising money in and of itself is not a bad thing, but statistically it is very unlikely that an entrepreneur will be able to raise VC funding, so creating a business that depends on outside funding usually guarantees that a business will never get off the ground in the first place. Additionally many VCs, like banks, prefer to give money to companies that don’t need it.

Most entrepreneurs will be best off if they create a business that is profitable (or at least generates solid revenue) without outside funding. That way outside funding becomes an option rather than a requirement. There are some industries, such as biotech, where large funding rounds may be necessary. Industries like that are outside of my area of expertise so I cannot comment on them except to say that many businesses can be started with less funding than you might think, if you get creative with your business model.

While no idea is completely new, Facebook was a pretty novel concept, filling a need that most people didn’t even know they had. Every once in a while, an idea comes along that creates a whole new category for productivity and communication. Examples include personal computers, cell phones, instant messaging, and online sites like Facebook or Twitter.

The allure of these revolutionary ideas often tempts entrepreneurs to try to come up with business ideas that have never been tried before. Unfortunately, most ideas have never been tried for a good reason. I advise aspiring entrepreneurs to forsake the temptation of doing something completely new in favor of entering an existing business category and capturing a portion of that market through solid execution and top notch service. Starting and running a successful business is hard enough when there is a proven market for your services. It becomes exponentially more difficult when you are in unknown territory and may very well fail even if your execution is perfect.

This advice applies especially for first-time entrepreneurs. If you are already a multi-millionaire after having sold a previous business, do whatever you want. You’ve earned the right to swing for the fences.

Could Facebook have been successful, or even solvent, if it topped out at 100,000 or even a million users? I don’t think so. Most advertising-based businesses need to reach a certain scale to attract the attention of advertisers. If a content site cannot get sufficient traffic, it is stuck serving low margin ads through content networks like Google AdSense.

Also, user generated content sites such as Facebook or EBay tend to be “winner take all” businesses, since people want to be on the network that everyone else is on. Most entrepreneurs would do well to ignore this example and to start a business that has a safety net, so if the grand vision for the business doesn’t come together, they are still left with a successful small business rather than just a stack of credit card bills.

In summary, Facebook is a great business that provides a very valuable service to its users. Without it, how would I ever keep up with people who I barely talked to during high school and learn about what music they are listening to or what they plan to cook for dinner?

Just like Ray Sullivan, the man who was struck by lightning 7 times in a span of less than 40 years, Facebook’s success is a story that captures our imagination and is a phenomenon at which to marvel. But before you go outside during a thunderstorm and grasp onto a tall metal pole, remember that we hear about these stories because they are remarkably uncommon and if you follow in their footsteps you are likely to get burned.

This article originally appeared on BusinessInsider.com and was written by ShareFile Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Jesse Lipson