10 Tips For Entrepreneurs And Start Ups Looking To Embrace Social Media
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/09/22/10-tips-for-entrepreneurs-and-start-ups-looking-to-embrace-social-media/
10 Tips For Entrepreneurs And Start Ups Looking To Embrace Social Media
I’ve been involved in a couple of start ups over the last couple of years and in both, due to having very limited marketing budgets, social media has been the main form of our marketing activities. This is the same for nearly all starts ups these days, social media is often the first port of call as it is cheap (often seen as free), accessible and fairly easy for founders and small teams to embrace. It’s a fairly logical step to start promoting your start up through social media because most entrepreneurs will have a decent personal network anyway so getting the message out to them is a next logical step. I wanted to share 10 of the top tips that I have picked up about using social media for start up businesses…
You Have Incredible Freedom
Many large organizations are crippled these days because getting one Facebook update, a tweet or blog post has to pass through several departments before getting sign off from legal. The beauty of being a start up is that you don’t face these challenges. Whatever you feel like saying you can pretty much just say, You can give people sneak access to products, share interesting facts about your company, do short videos or talk to your customers in the way you see fit. As a start up you have the incredible luxury of being able to push your message out and engage in the way you see fit with very few limitations. Embrace that freedom and share useful information that big competitors can’t.
It Won’t Be A 3 Month Quick Win
I’d always urge start ups to take a long term view on social media. Chances are you won’t get much out of it in the first 3 months. Nobody will read your blog, your Facebook page will have a few friends and family as fans and it’ll feel as if you are talking to yourself on Twitter. Building a network takes a lot of time. It’s only after a year or two of networking online and building relationships that you start to see the real value. Most start ups and businesses jump in to social media thinking it will solve all their problems only to be disappointed by the results and leave. The one piece of advice I would have here is to really stick at it because it will work in the long run but it takes time and patience.
Social Media Won’t Help Your Traffic That Much
Too many start ups I see use social media purely as a function to drive traffic to their website. Special offers, discount deals, pointing to blog posts with awards or just coming in with the hard sell will never get you anywhere. You need to find an angle. I love small start ups that share stats for example or give me a glimpse behind the scenes of what they are building. I like to know about the personalities behind the company. I won’t click on a Facebook update where you try to sell me something but if you show me a picture of you and the team drinking beers after a hard week chances are I might interact with that content. For all the talk of social search and Twitter driving traffic it is still very much about search engines if it is traffic you are after, chances are 70-80% of your traffic will come through search engines with tiny amounts coming through social media.
Ask Yourself Will It Actually Drive Sales?
Business is fairly straight forward…you need to bring more money in than you have going out. If you are going to be spending money or time on social media then you need to ask yourself the hard question of is it actually going to lead to sales. This may seem confusing given that I say not to come across with the hard sell in the last point but at the same time you can’t be doing social media for the good of your health. If you have set out to market yourself using social media then you need to set some goals. Will the fact that you provide outstanding customer service via Twitter keep your customers loyal and mean they keep coming back to you? Can you give away lots of information that is useful to your customers via a blog so as they keep coming back and eventually buy your premium services or products. I’d have very clear established goals as to what you want to achieve from your social media activity as a start up and I would plan for them over a long period of time.
Don’t Get In To Thinking Social Media Is Work
I cringe at the amount of time I see some people involved in startups on Twitter every day. I was guilty of it myself in the early days but it’s important to remember that twitter is not work. Sure you can use it in some of the ways above to get a little bit of leverage for your business but sitting on there all day reading links and talking to people is not actually working. I know it sounds very obvious but too many people lose sight of that and get caught up in social media. It is as it’s name sugg
No comments:
Post a Comment