How to Improve Your Startup's Social Media Strategy
Last Updated: By TRUiC Team
As a startup, you’ve put in the time and effort to develop a great product or service, but that’s often just the beginning.
After your initial product or offering creation process, even if you’re starting with a minimum viable product (MVP), you need to place a significant amount of focus on marketing and develop a social media presence.
When your customers can recognize your brand and begin to educate themselves about how your startup can solve their problems, they’ll be more likely to purchase your products and services in the future.
In this guide, we’re going to walk through a few steps your startup can take to improve your social media strategy and begin growing your customer base.
Social Media for Startups
When it comes to boosting your lead generation and increasing brand awareness for your startup, social media can be the “secret weapon” that allows you to sneak up behind your competition and blow them out of the water.
Unlike paid advertising, social media is a very low-cost means of marketing and is a channel that all of the largest organizations use, understand, and manage. If you’ve ever tagged or mentioned a large corporation on social media and received an instantaneous response, you can see firsthand how powerful a social media strategy can be in terms of brand recognition and PR.
Reaching out to interested customers or even disgruntled ones early on can make a significant difference in how your brand is perceived moving forward.
Let’s discuss ways your startup can develop a solid social media strategy and a presence that gets more customers into your sales channels.
What Is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is an all-encompassing term that refers to anything and everything you plan to do on social media platforms to benefit your business.
Defining a social media strategy for your startup can be done by defining which channels you’re going to pursue, what types of content you’ll post, at what frequency you will post and interact with prospects and customers, and how you'll further educate your prospects about your business.
How to Boost Your Startup Social Media Marketing
Creating a few social media profiles and posting once in a blue moon isn’t enough to get your prospects and customers engaged with your startup – you have to do more.
Fortunately, boosting your startup's social media marketing is possible with a few simple steps, strategies, and techniques.
We’re going to discuss how you can improve your social media presence by engaging with your followers firsthand, developing a multi-channel strategy, working with influencers to promote your brand, tracking social media analytics, and implementing multimedia as well as posting on a consistent basis.
1. Engage With Your Followers
Engaging with your followers is one of the most important aspects of a solid social media marketing strategy for your startup. Every follower you engage with is a potential prospect who may be interested in what your startup has to offer, or they may be a past customer looking for a reason to engage with your business once again.
Your startup can engage with your followers by replying to each mention, replying to comments, and even looking into automated social media tools that can reply with an initial “introductory” message to start the conversation.
2. Develop a Multi-Channel Strategy
Most people these days seamlessly move across multiple social media platforms on a daily basis, even multiple times per day. Every social media platform presents news and new information in a slightly different way, which is why it’s important for your startup to adapt and present different types of content simultaneously.
Your startup may consider text content, video content, and image content as your primary three “pillars” to a solid social media strategy. By posting the same message across multiple content mediums and multiple platforms, you’ll significantly increase your reach and allow more and more of your audience to engage with your brand.
3. Work With Influencers
The rise of social media influencers in recent years has made collaborations, partnerships, and promotions with brands more and more prevalent. If your startup is targeting a specific audience or “avatar” that an influencer matches with, why not partner with that influencer to have direct access to a new potential pool of buyers? Working with influencers on social media is an excellent strategy that has been proven to work for numerous brands, often giving them a significant advantage over their competitors.
4. Track Analytics
If you’re not tracking social media engagement metrics and keeping an eye on how your social media content is performing, you may be falling behind the curve. It’s now more important than ever for your startup to keep a close eye on your social media analytics and determine which content “hits” with your audience and which content “flops.” This will allow you to create content that specifically caters to your particular audience and improve your engagement metrics.
5. Implement Multimedia
Having a social media strategy that uses multiple types of content, such as text, video, and image content, is a great way to reach different “segments” of your audience. Not everyone in your audience will absorb information the same way. Some people prefer to watch videos while others prefer to read text, so why not cater to both segments of your audience?
6. Keep a Consistent Schedule
When your prospective customers look at your social media pages and see inactivity, they will more often than not be completely put-off and can even begin to view your brand as “abandoned.” With all of the noise out there today, you must keep a consistent and even frequent posting schedule across social media if you want to stay competitive in today’s environment.
