How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Startup

When budgeting for the growth of your startup, expenses can quickly add up. Thanks to social media, marketing doesn’t have to be a big expense, or even an expense at all. You have access to all different types of people on social media and chances are your ideal audience is on there.

If you’re ready to use social media to grow your startup, you need to do these 4 things:

Create a Social Media Strategy

If you really want to use social media to grow your startup, you need to take it seriously. That means creating a social media strategy. A social media strategy includes your social media goals and a Plan of Action to reach those goals. You also need to get clear on what type of content you’ll be sharing on each platform.

There are a lot of fun things you can incorporate into your social media strategy to help grow your startup. You can host giveaways and challenges to get more people to your social media accounts and increase brand awareness

Research Your Competitors

Unless you’ve discovered something that’s completely new to the market, there’s probably someone out there doing what you’re doing. Which is a great thing for you for 2 reasons. First, they’ve built a business in a similar (or the same) industry as you so your idea has already been tested and proved. Second, they’re already reaching your ideal audience and you can learn from them.

Find out who your competitors are and start researching how they’re connecting with their audience on social media. A few key things to look for are the types of content they’re sharing, what platforms they’re using and what content their audience is responding best to.

Get Active on Social Media

If you want to use social media to grow your startup, you have to be active on social media. The easiest way to constantly share valuable content is to use a social media scheduler, like SmarterQueue, to schedule posts. Your work doesn’t end there though. Being active on social media doesn’t just mean that you’re constantly sharing content. It also means that you’re constantly engaging with your audience.

Even if you just have 10 minutes a day to spare to retweet people’s content, like their replies and reply to their comments, those 10 minutes can go a long way. Your audience wants to know that they’re being heard and you’re only a tweet away.

Become Best Friends with Video

If you haven’t noticed, video is popping up everywhere on social media. Facebook live, Instagram stories, Snapchat, you name it! If your audience is hanging out on a specific platform, there’s probably a way to share video on it.

You might be wondering what all the fuss is about video on social media. Facebook even tends to favor video content and the organic reach always ends up so much higher than posts with plain text or images.

The main reason businesses are all over video is because their audience eats it up. They love getting to see the human beings behind the business, not just some automated social media post every few hours. You’re running a startup, you have a ton of content to share!

Let your employees do account takeovers where they show what a day in the life of a Marketing Manager at a startup is like. Or, share sneak peeks at what you’ve got brewing to get your audience excited.

There are many ways to use social media to grow your startup and you’ll discover what works best for you and your audience by testing different strategies. Share a variety of content, post at different times and make your social media accounts reflect your brand.

Most importantly, engage with your audience and listen to them on social media so you turn them into loyal customers and clients.