6 Steps to Grow Your Startup with Social Media

One of the most important things for startups is to get traction. Getting traction means getting people to talk about your business and buying your product or service. In the modern world, one of the best ways to start being noticed is building a strong online presence. But how to do social media as a startup? You only have limited time and limited resources so you don’t want to waste either.

Here are the steps to take to grow your startup with social media.

1. Pick only the platforms that matter

The world is full of social media channels, and you can’t really make meaningful profiles on each of them. Ideally, your startup should pick two to three channels that best fit your target audience. Finding the right channel requires you to:

• Create a customer profile – Identifies who is your typical customer.
• Find your typical customer’s social media profile – Identify how, where and when they use social media.
• Figure the kind of content the typical customer likes – Identify the kind of content the person loves to engage with and share with others (videos, blog posts, photos, etc.)

When you start creating content, you need to keep the ideal customer profile in mind. Is the content going to interest the customer? Will it help solve problems they might have? Does it encourage them to learn more about your startup and the products or services you are offering?

2. Create a consistent and regular social media schedule

When you know the platforms and the content type, you need to start creating a social media schedule. This means identifying when and what you post on social media.

The key words are consistency and regularity. You want the posts to follow a specific feel and topic matter. You can’t suddenly start changing how you post and more importantly,don’t be irregular with your schedule. It’s important your followers can expect new contact or they’ll soon stop following you.

In addition, you want to figure out when the best time is for engaging customers. When you create the profile for the ideal customer, you need to emphasise how they use social media and more importantly, when do they use it. You don’t want to post your content in the morning if you know your customers will only read it in the evening. You can make your social media posting easier with a platform that manages multiple accounts at once. Hootsuite is a popular pick and it’s currently offering vouchers at OZCodes.com.au.

3. Engage with your followers

Social media works for startups because it makes talking to your customers a lot easier and more straightforward. Therefore, the key to using social media correctly is to make it a two-way conversation rather than just a channel where you advertise your startup.

It’s important to create social media posts that engage your audience. There are several ways to do this. You can:

• Create surveys or polls.
• Organise contests.
• Incorporate humour and visuals.
• Challenge your followers to things like charitable donations.
• Include customers in your posts.

Furthermore, try to invite and encourage your customers to talk and ask questions. When they do engage with you, always reply as promptly as possible and keep the conversation going. Remember, even if the comment or question is neutral or, indeed, negative, you need to respond to it.

4. Stop using social media as a pure marketing channel

As mentioned above, you don’t ever want to use social media just to advertise your startup. Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use to promote your business and to encourage people to buy your products or to use your service.

A good rule of thumb is to follow the 80/20 rule. This means spending 80% of the time talking about things that are not related to your product or service. For the 20% of the time, you can talk about what your startup is offering. This could be content mentioning special offers, trials, product descriptions and so on. You can also direct customers to participating websites.

5.Check for changes regularly

Social media platforms are constantly making changes in order to attract new users and to give existing users something different to experience. For businesses, this can be tricky. It’s important to ensure you are constantly checking whether the platforms you’ve chosen have made tweaks and changed the way you should be using the platform. You can find social media news from content marketing and small business websites.

6.Have a crisis plan for when things don’t go according to plan

Finally, make sure you are prepared for the negative publicity you might get on social media. There will always be those that bash startups on social media and you don’t just want to ignore them. So, develop strategies that help you to deal with these situations.

You essentially want to be positive and have pre-thought responses ready for the most common customer complaints. Be swift in your response and always try to offer solutions to solve the customer’s problem. Don’t make concessions or give in to baseless accusations – be consistent, steady and friendly in these situations.

So, take these six steps when you want to grow your startup with social media.