Social Media is great for rapid fire conversations. It's more of a quick thought and fast comment medium — not really a long form narrative medium like the Web or newsletters. This makes it an ideal place for gathering feedback, whether it's a lightweight response in the form of a "like" or a more thoughtful long form comment.
What's also nice about social media is the ability to swiftly extend our reach beyond our immediate social circle. Well-crafted posts can be designed to be shared — which can quickly increase our exposure without costing us anything.
We want to think of social media like a cocktail party where we're having short conversations with people and hope to get one or two good thoughts out of them. It's not the long "catch up" discussion that we’re having on a park bench that a newsletter might afford us.
Billions around the world are on social media. Including your customers. If you haven’t already established a presence, we’ll show you how to get going so you can meet your customers where they are.
It’s time to start talking to our audience. Much like newsletters, our posts will be highly outcome-driven. The key thing here is engaging with and surveying our audience without it coming off as overly salesy.
Not only are we going to spread our message across every channel available to us, but we’re going to see how valuable simple actions like following others, sharing their content, and commenting on their posts can help us move the needle in a really meaningful way.
We're going to leverage social media as a blend of surveying and lightweight customer acquisition.
We're going to make great use of the conversational nature of social by asking our audience tons of questions. We're going to be surveying them, but asking them in a more natural way that doesn't feel like survey.
Each post will serve as another opportunity to get folks to follow a link back to our site and join our mailing list or test our product. Ideally, we want to find people outside our own social circles so that we can broaden the reach of our early customer acquisition efforts with minimal cost.
These efforts will go hand in hand so we're looking to get into a "two birds with one stone" situation. (That’s assuming you're OK with pelting birds with stones, which you probably shouldn't be…)
The challenge Founders (or any marketer for that matter) run into when trying to leverage social is by starting off in a self-centered way -
"Here's my stuff, look at me, focus on me, react to ME!"
Then they get disappointed when apparently no one gives a shit.
That's not because social didn't work. It's because they didn't use social the right way. Using a one-to-many approach where we just stand on a soapbox with a megaphone and talk nonstop doesn't interest anyone.
The only thing anyone cares about on social media is themselves, so we need to feed their ego — not ours.
A good social media approach involves looking for as many ways to engage other people (this takes work) as it does hoping people will engage us. A simple formula is to think of it like this - for every 1 “like” someone has for us, we have to find 2 likes for someone else. Does that sound like a ton of work? It is. But that's the rub with social media - we have to actually be social!
Our approach to social will start off fairly modest — with our own social networks — and then grow them a bit toward a network more specific to our new startup. To grow our network, we'll begin a regimen of consistently engaging our followers with questions and conversation topics as well as taking some time to respond to others so that we're not hogging all the attention.
We'll also be extra mindful to respond quickly whenever someone else reacts to our posts so that people know we are listening. We don't need a ton of followers just yet - we just need a small group of followers who are willing and able to engage with us on a regular basis. This is how we are going to build our initial superfans which form the basis for a much larger customer population as we grow.
Whether our startup is brand spankin’ new or if we’ve been around the block a few times — social media is a “must-have” for a successful online marketing strategy.
But, before we start creating social profiles for our startup, it’s a good idea to first create a new email account specifically for social. It doesn’t have to be fancy — just something simple like “social@ourstartupname.com”.
We’re going to get a ton of email from these sites — so, keeping things separate makes it’s easier to manage and filter from a separate email account.
From a team perspective, this will also keep things neat and organized if we decide to have more than one person publishing one of our social media profiles — or for when we hire on someone to take over our social media accounts.
To have a strong presence on social media, it’s important to create a consistent voice. If several people are going to contribute to our social channels — we should also create a social media style guide.
Facebook is the “world’s largest social network” with over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide. Between the United States and Canada alone — there are nearly 200 million people that log into Facebook every day.
To put that in perspective, that’s 80 million MORE people than the 103 million viewers that tuned into the 2018 Super Bowl. The good news is you don’t need a budget of Super Bowl proportions to get into the Facebook game.
To get started, navigate to facebook.com/pages/create. You’ll then select what type of page you want to create. Then, you’ll fill out the required information and click on “Get Started”. After that, Facebook will walk you through the page creation process with easy-to-follow on-screen instructions.
To get your first followers, link your profile to your page and invite your friends and family to “like” your page.
People on Twitter are looking for what’s new — for great content and stories from the people, businesses, and brands that they’re interested in. Also, about 47% of people who follow a brand on Twitter are more likely to visit that company’s website.
To get started, head over to the Twitter homepage and click on the button that says “Sign Up Now.” Then, complete the signup information that is required.
To get your first followers — you can use the feature that they offer during signup to import your email addresses from your Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook email account, which will enable you to begin following some of your contacts — and hopefully they’ll follow you back!
A LinkedIn Company Page helps others connect and learn more about your business, products and services. But before you create a LinkedIn page for your business, you first need to have a LinkedIn profile with your real first and last name.
After you have your personal page made, Click the “Work” icon in the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage. You’ll then navigate over to “Create a Company Page”.
After entering your company name, you’ll need to choose a URL. Then, after verifying that you have the right to act on behalf of your company, you’ll click the “Create Page” button.
In addition to sharing interesting and relevant content, to get your first few users, you can invite and share your company page with your connections on your personal page.
Instagram is a place where visual expression from businesses inspires people around the globe to take action. In fact — 60% of people have said that they have discovered a new product via Instagram and 200 Million Instagrammers visit at least one Business Profile each day.
Creating an Instagram Business Account is fairly easy — after downloading the Instagram app for iOS from the App Store, Android from Google Play store, or Windows Phone from the Windows Phone Store — tap to open it.
You’ll then select “Sign Up” and enter the details required — or, you can log in with your Facebook account to sign up that way.
You’ll then want to create a free business profile to give people more information about your products, service or business. Visit “settings” and select “Switch to Business Account”. Once you’ve done this, you can then add any pertinent information — like your hours, business address, or phone number.
To get your first few users, begin posting content that you’d like to see on your own feed. Be sure to use relevant hashtags and follow accounts that are similar to yours.
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