Over the past few months, I have attended a few business growth seminars on behalf of 21 Forbes Place. The majority of attendees alongside me have been owners of small businesses who were there to learn more about how to market or promote their business. The only problem for them was – they cringed at the thought of self-promotion!

When asked to tell a room of 5-10 people why their business is the best in its field, I witnessed many of these business owners squirm and hide rather than be glad for the opportunity to share what they do best or ‘shamelessly self-promote’. Now throughout the seminars, I could tell that these individuals work extremely hard, love what they do and do whatever they can to provide an excellent service/product/experience or whatever it may be. So I could not understand why they would not want to shout about it when they got the chance!

This was generally put down to an inherent Scottish shyness and a culture where we view self-promotion as bragging or arrogance. But this does not have to be the case. Self-promotion doesn’t mean telling anyone who’ll listen just how great you are; it means listening to your market, or someone you’ve met at a networking event and finding a reason to promote yourself which will help them. After all, you are the best at what you do, so why would you want the people you meet to spend their money on a less worthy product?

As the marketing executive of 21 Forbes Place, I am constantly trying to get in front of people who I think will benefit from what we provide. I promote it because I am working hard to develop 21 Forbes Place as a business community and I believe in the integrity of the owners and what they want to achieve.

So I would like to set a challenge to the readers of this post: either in the comments below, or on your Twitter handle: use the 140 character limit and #SSP to tell everyone why you are the best at what you do.

Be proud to promote yourself and others will too!