In one sentence, the advice that business owners and marketers need to hear is this: “Everything on your Facebook page should be centered around the real world.”

No, I don’t mean the reality TV show that launched it all in 1992. When The Real World launched on MTV 27 seasons ago (yes, it’s still going strong in case you weren’t aware), it set in motion a genre of television that many people claim to hate but that still gets millions of viewers every day. Today, the day to day version of “the real world of marketing on Facebook” should take one concept from the original show intro: “…start getting real.”

There’s a reason why you won’t hear this from people in the social media industries. The gurus and specialists who rely on Facebook management services to make a living don’t want businesses to know that the most successful local business pages are run from the stores themselves. The ability to stay real, organic, and authentic through social media is arguably the most important component in a successful business presence. To gurus, it means that their services cannot be as good as the real thing happening at the physical locations. To businesses, it means that all of the tools are either at your fingertips or scattered across the physical world around you.

As someone whose company offers social media products, one might wonder why I would give this advice. It’s simple – what can be done and what does get done are two different things. I wouldn’t be honest if I said that services offer the best possible results when the reality is that a well-guided and properly-deployed strategy by employees at a local business can be more effective than anything remote. However, the combination of a lack of updated knowledge in this constantly-changing arena mixed with the lack of time of the employees at a local business mean that sometimes it’s best to settle for second best.

Thankfully, when done right, second best isn’t far off from being the best. There are more failures happening from homegrown campaigns and strategies than from agency-run strategies because of both of these points. It takes time. It takes research. These are things that are easier left to those who do it on a regular basis for most businesses. However, if a business has the time to stay on top of the campaigns as well as the changes happening in the platforms, trends, and attitudes in the real world, they can have the greatest level of success.