Posted by As an early-stage startup, you should make use of the best available resources to engage with your customers and establish a social media presence of your own. In today’s world, social media plays a vital role in increasing the reach to your audience. It is also one of the cheapest marketing tools that you can utilize to establish your brand online and that’s why you need Social media tips that actually work!
Social media can also help startups to get noticed by investors, maintaining customer relations and a platform to share any news and updates related to the business. If you are planning to get your brand on social media, here are a few tips that you may find useful.
Start With a Plan
Social media can be a tempting space to start posting anything and everything. Still, if you are representing your brand on social media, it takes more than just creativity to get people to follow you. A solid strategy should back any social media activity for a brand. Your goal should not adhere only to gaining likes and followers, but also making conversions happen.
To get a fair idea about how to get on with social media posts, try to follow brands from similar niche and check out how they engage with their customers. Then create a social media plan based on what your competitors seem to be doing and excelling at. Next, you need to set a tone for your social media posts and ensure that it is maintained across all social media platforms.
In terms of posting images and videos, it is essential to follow a specific theme, such as adding your brand logo in all posts or adding a frame colour for all images similar to your brand logo. By doing this, you’ll be able to establish a brand identity from the beginning, and people will be able to recognize your posts instantly based on the tone or the colour scheme used.
Once you decide how to personalize your social media posts, next, you need to create a content calendar and update it every month. A content calendar can help you plan your social media posts for an entire month so that you don’t have to scratch your head for post ideas everyday. When you maintain a social media calendar, it also gets easy for you to consider upcoming festivals and special events and customize your posts accordingly.
Choose the Right Platforms
There are thousands of social media platforms available today. However, you cannot expect people to stay active on all of them together. You have to analyze the best social media platforms in which you can find your target audience and then create profiles on them to start posting. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are some of the widely used social media platforms where most businesses try to establish their online presence.
As a startup owner, you should also research on the type of posts that gets the most traction on each platform, so that you can plan posts for your content calendar accordingly. Also, the post description will vary on each platform when you try to share the same content. For example, in Facebook, you can write a lengthy description of the product you are selling, but on twitter, you have to describe the same in 280 characters.
Know Your Audience
Besides knowing the social media platforms where you intend to post, you should also know your audience well. This is essential to ensure that your audience can relate to the posts you publish on social media. Social media analytics can help you find the gender, age, location and interests of your followers. Using this info, you can plan better content on social media.
Expand Your Audience
When you have a clear idea about the audience that follows you, you can use the info to retarget people through social media ads. For example, your followers mainly consist of children between 12-18 years old, you can run Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns to target children of the same age group for a given city or locality. When these people come across your ad, they are likely to visit your site and make a purchase. This is how you can find more audience and expand your audience base.
Build Relationships
Sharing posts on social media doesn’t guarantee the success of your brand unless you turn it into an interactive platform. This means while you share your content on social media channels, ensure than you reply to people’s comments and queries on your posts. Every now and then, you can also ask people to give feedback about your business or your social media posts and get suggestions for improvement. This will make them feel valued and appreciated as customers.
Create High-Quality Posts
To make your social media posts distinct, besides maintaining a tone and using a particular colour scheme for posts, you should equally work on creating high-quality content that is engaging and error-free. If you are using images and videos, try to post original images clicked on a professional camera instead of a mobile phone. Also, avoid being too formal on social media and use the right hashtags to increase your post visibility and gain more followers.
Focus on Quality Over Quantity
As discussed above, you should spend time in perfecting your social media posts rather thanking worrying about the number of posts that goes out in a day. You may choose to post thrice a week instead of posting every day, but ensure that your posts are interesting enough to garner attention and make people wait for more.
Use the Right Tools
The success of any social media strategy lies in the tools that you use. If you have access to the right tools, then posting, managing and tracking social media posts becomes very easy. Tools like Hootsuite can be used to manage all your social media channels in one place. You can use this tool to schedule posts in its dashboard and track all messages and mentions in one place.
For professional graphics, you can use tools like Canva and Piktochart. For content management, you can use Buzzsumo. With image and content management tools, you can use social media more efficiently and save your time to focus on other aspects of your startup business.
Monitor and Reply Everyone
Whether you get a mention from another brand or from a humble follower, as a startup, you must try to engage with people at all levels by sending them replies and answering to their queries. The more you engage with your audience, the more they realize the value you have for them. This boosts brand loyalty and attracts new customers.
Track Your Performance
To understand the impact of your social media strategy, you must measure it. Social media tracking helps you to keep track of the performance of your social posts and help you to plan effectively for the future content calendar. Tracking all social media channels is helpful in offering you a deep insight into what people read vs. what people really want to read.
Rework on Your Shortcomings
If your social media strategy doesn’t work as effectively as you expect it to be, there’s no reason to get disheartened. You can use the opportunity to rework on your current social media plans and experiment with new strategies. Social media is a space where you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with your posts.
With these social media tips of 2020, any start-up can take their first step to social media marketing and begin their journey of expanding their presence online. The dynamic nature of social media makes it important for any entrepreneur or business owner to keep a tab of the latest trends and implement the same in the current strategy from time-to-time. This help brands to become viral or get the much-needed visibility that they require, especially at the early stage of their business.
Shreoshe has been writing professionally for more than three years. She has experience in guest posting service and enjoys learning new technologies. She’s also a movie buff and an amazing cook. She plans to start an animal shelter someday to work for the welfare of street animals.
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I do not know how to express my feelings towards this awesome post. Your write up is brilliant. Yes, it is now more important than ever. The numbers speak for themselves how social media has taken over traditional marketing methods and has become a world in itself. Digital marketing for startups is crucial today and many startups have failed due to the absence of an effective social media strategy.