I’ve decided to step out and say what few people are willing to say: women business owners need to approach social media differently than male business owners.

This is not based on some “shrink it and pink it” mentality that I’ve adopted. This idea comes from YEARS of working with (for the most part) only women business owners — and actually BEING a woman business owner myself. Call it generalizing or gender-based stereotypes (or any other politically correct label you want to give it), but women think differently and we LEARN differently. Period. I’ve seen it every single day for the past 13 years I’ve been self-employed.

Women invented social media. After all, who recommends more products and services than women? No one. If we’re the originators of “word of mouth”, shouldn’t our businesses benefit from it?

Here are a few reasons why women need to approach social media usage differently:

• Women don’t have time (or the inclination) to “poke around” or “figure it out”. We’re not crazy. We recognize the value of social media, but we need to use marketing tools that get a measurable amount of progress in a reasonable amount of time.
• From a time management perspective alone, women need to do the right things, at the right times for the right reasons to get the right results. No matter how much we’ve ‘evolved’, women are still responsible for the bulk of child and family care. We have friendships to maintain, lives to shape and lead and oh, there’s that minor matter of personal time.
• Social media lends itself to the way women naturally communicate and share ideas. Historically, most storytellers are women. Women exchange “secrets” to build trust, not men; and these nuances carry through online. (The good news is you get to define whether a “secret” is something marginally personal or soul-baring.)

So, I got sick and tired of reading blogs written by guys (and gals, but mostly guys) giving advice like:

• “Just jump in and get your feet wet.”
• “Send a note to your friends and connect.”
• “Just create a Twitter account – it’s free and easy.”
• “Find people to follow on Twitter and then talk to them.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time to do stuff to “get my feet wet”. I want to know what the hell I’m doing right from Jump Street and if I can’t know that, I ain’t doing it. I also have NO desire to connect with my pals and family on Facebook. This is BUSINESS, not some crazy chips and dip get together. And, if you create the account, what then?? How do you know who the right people to follow on Twitter are? How do you talk to them? All of this advice is so GENERAL and AMBIGUOUS that it makes me ill.

After getting tired of ranting about the problem (and because I’m someone that doesn’t like people to complain without offering a solution), I started the Real Women Do Social Media Revolution – that kicked off this month with the Real Women Do Social Media Program. (You can click the link to visit that website to read all about the event that’s kicking off the revolution.)

Here’s what I know for sure: One-size-fits-all only works for baseball caps and t-shirts. Just as women need to examine their finances differently and we tolerate medicine differently, when we understand that if we approach social media differently, we’ll have much better results than using one-size-fits-all-guy-centric methods.

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Lena L. West is the CEO of xynoMedia http://www.xynoMedia.com a company that helps growing companies profit from the power of social media & the Internet.