Forming your startup’s social media strategy will help you scale up your social media efforts. An effective social media strategy allows you to become a thought leader in your field, build trust with prospects, find prospective investors, and get the word out about your startup.
People spend an average of 3 hours per day on social media. Use the addictive nature of social media to your startup’s advantage by developing a strategy that will get the word out, build trust, and grow revenue for your startup.
We’ll discuss the basics of forming your social media strategy including:
● Picking a goal
● Choosing which platforms you’ll post to
● Choosing what content to post
● Creating a content calendar
● Measuring and improving results
The first thing to do when planning your social media strategy for your startup is to pick a goal. A few examples of goals are gaining more followers, having people watch your latest video, or generating hype about an upcoming product launch.
There are many social networks that your startup can post content to. The most important thing is to find where your target audience hangs out online.
With its 1.5 billion active monthly users, this social network is where most social media marketers focus their efforts. While this social network has the highest user count, they only create 100million pieces of content per day (only 25% are photos). Facebook is a great place to get broad exposure.
Facebook groups are a great opportunity to find places where your target audience is hanging out. There are groups for every niche, and It’s easy to create your own to drive value to a certain industry, niche or group of people.
Instagram has 800+ million active monthly users with 95 million images shared per day! The average amount of followers for brands on Instagram is 4 times higher than on Facebook.
Visual or design
LinkedIn is widely considered the leader forB2B social media, helping startups that serve business directly. With 467million users on this social network, it is a great platform to share text-based content. This social media site is particularly helpful if you want to promote your startup’s content and engage with journalists and companies in your industry.
Pinterest is a social networking site that enables members to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events or topics through virtual pinboards." This social platform can be beneficial if you want to reach people who like to do research online before making purchases.
With 322 million active users per month with500+ million tweets per day, Twitter is a huge platform. The average person creates 55 tweets per day (two-thirds of which are less than 140 characters),so it can get a little noisy. Twitter’s search function and the 1 billion searches that’re performed everyday can help you cut through the noise.
TikTok is a social media app where people can share short videos with their friends, family, and the public. Gen Z users, especially, have been part of its explosive growth.. In 2019, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the world! It has many types of short videos including pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dance, and entertainment. Videos range from 15 seconds to 10 minutes in length.
Once you have picked a goal for your target audience and figured out which platform you'll find them on, you can now begin thinking about what type of content to post. Content that appeals to emotions tends to elicit larger responses from followers. Additionally, Facebook posts with images see 2 times more engagement compared to those without.
A simple yet effective social media strategy is to focus on sharing helpful content that provides value to your target audience. This social media strategy can be applied to your startup’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Making time every single day to write and post on multiple social media platforms can be difficult, especially for startups when time and resources are extremely limited. Saving all your posts to a content calendar and setting time aside to write your posts all at one time can help make this task easier. You can schedule this time weekly or monthly, and you can use Google Sheets or Excel to host your saved content.
Use a content calendar so that your startup can plan, create and post on social media without burning 1-2 hours every day.
The key to success for any startup social media strategy is to measure your performance and work to constantly improve. Most social networks don’t provide much of a view into your analytics unless you’re running ads with them. Tools like social media posting platform, Hootsuite, will help you track the performance of your organic social media posting efforts. Google Analytics will also help with tracking results, it tracks how much website traffic you’re getting from social media.
Important social media metrics to track include:
● Impressions: How many times your posts are seen.
● Engagement: How many times people like, comment or share your posts.
● New Followers: How many people decided to follow you recently.
Use the data that you collect to make decisions about what social media posts are moving the needle for your startup. One tip that could really help step up your startup’s social media posting is repurposing posts that have performed well. Once you’ve identified the posts that are performing, make some adjustments, or keep them the same, then repost. There’s a good chance that the majority of your audience has not seen this content, and the ones that have seen it probably won’t remember.
The death of your startup’s social media strategy comes when you allow it to stagnate. You should have a core group of content, however, it needs to stay fresh and new. This can be accomplished by rewording or adding to past posts, especially if they have performed really well.
An effective social media strategy for your startup will allow you to scalably plan, create, and post content without wasting hours of every day.
