7 Ways to Boost Your Startup’s Social Media Influence

Regardless of your startup’s current development phase, you should strive to find time to begin or maintain your social media following.

With the capacity to provide information, promote goods and services, and interact with consumers, social media is an incredibly powerful digital marketing tool. Startups can leverage the power of social media to boost their influence and attract new customers.

However, it’s also essential to avoid common pitfalls on social media and develop a strong plan for increasing customer engagement. If you’re looking for techniques to help maximize the potential of your startup’s social media strategy, check out the following seven tips to get you started.

#1 Establish Your Social Media Strategy Prior to Setting Up Social Media Profiles

Before you decide on what social media platforms to use, consider your business goals and determine how social media can assist you in achieving them. Keep your target audience in mind and imagine exactly what kind of tone you want to convey through social media.

Remember to align your social media presence with your business’ culture and values. If your company prides itself on being laid-back, then make sure you illustrate this through your social media posts. But if your company culture is focused on energy and enthusiasm, find a way to depict this through your media marketing plan.

To assure the harmonization of all channels, you may want to establish a document to summarize the objectives of your startup’s social media strategy. Present or disperse this among your staff. If you aim for consistency when crafting how you will display your company’s presence on social media, more people will recognize your brand and business.

#2 Pick the Optimal Social Media Platform

While Facebook might have the largest number of users in its network, this doesn’t always mean it is the right social platform for your media marketing strategy. If your target audience doesn’t have a large presence in a platform’s base, it might not be worth the effort.

Though not all industries have a defined channel preference, there are some factors to take into account when choosing social platforms. First, consider the age range of your target audience, your company’s regional location or locations, and the essence of your goods or service. As an example, if your startup is a B2B company with the business objective of providing financial advice to other business owners, you might want to create a profile on LinkedIn, which features a large community of business professionals.

But if your business is a local B2C pizza place, you’ll want to select platforms people typically use when they are looking for bars or restaurants, such as Yelp or Google. If your business is centered around marketing, you’ll definitely want to create profiles on Facebook and Twitter in order to maximize the potential of your promotional content. After you successfully reach members of your target audience on the right platform for your startup, you can further investigate what social channels your target audience is using and proceed to make accounts on those sites as well.

#3 Use Social Media as a Customer Service Platform

Offering and maintaining a line of communication with your consumers is essential to the short and long-term success of your business. Your capacity to respond to concerns, answer questions, and include consumer suggestions can have an outstanding impact on your company’s reputation. Social media is an excellent means of providing top-notch customer service and ensuring your client’s needs are met. You can respond to customer concerns and input at any time, from any place. Since registering on many social platforms doesn’t cost money, this method is also cost-efficient. To begin setting up platforms for customer service inquiries, utilize a social media management tool such as Hootsuite. These tools organize data streams for your company’s name and monitor any mentions. Analysis tools also assist you in tracking any negative mentions of your startup as they appear, so you can attend to unsatisfied consumer complaints in hopes of offering a resolution as quickly as possible.

#4 Develop Your Startup With Social Media Recruiting

While your potential consumers are the key focus of your social media marketing strategy, they aren’t the only audience you should be paying attention to. If your company is seeking hard-working, dedicated employees to be a part of your team, great candidates may be within your social media following. When you have a position to fill, always share the details on your social media accounts, particularly if you are looking for someone to handle your social media management projects. Try using networks ideal for promoting brand awareness, such as Instagram, to visually showcase major business achievements. Showing your followers how exciting is it to work at your startup promotes company culture and gets people who share your values and enthusiasm interested in working for you.

#5 Cultivate a Community of Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

The key to a perfect marketing strategy is to make a real human connection with the audience. This may seem difficult to accomplish using social media, but showing your followers the individuals behind your products and services goes a long way to establish a connection and strengthen the support of your startup. Inspire your audience by telling them how you came up with the idea for your startup, and why your team loves what they do. As people react, you’ll be able to spot individuals who read your content and become inspired. Take this connection and offer passionate individuals the opportunity to be social media influencers and brand ambassadors. These influencers help increase your startup’s exposure and promote your band name.

#6 Monitor Your Progress

It is normal for startup businesses to become overwhelmed as the business begins to grow at a rapid speed. When you have organized your social accounts, established a media marketing strategy and designed a schedule for your social media management, plan to examine and evaluate all accounts and channels on a regular basis. Monitoring customer engagement works toward sustaining a lasting presence. Evaluating the performance of all social platforms will assist you in comparing and contrasting the effectiveness of each.

Tools such as Sprout Social, Tailwind, Ahrefs, and Grade Your Social are very helpful.  They thoroughly investigate your online presence on specific social media platforms and give insight into audience engagement. If reports indicate your consumers aren’t interacting with your brand on one of your social platforms, examine the channel to make sure it is updated regularly and hasn’t been forgotten. Performing regular checkups determines what is working and what isn’t, and allows you to tweak your social media strategy whenever you notice issues.

#7 Explore New Trends and Strategies

Though it is important to be cognizant of traditional methods of social media marketing, don’t discount new media marketing strategies. Inspirational vigor within the foundation of a startup company stems from the desire to actualize a unique product or offer a novel method of resolving a problem. Don’t be afraid to channel your startup’s creative energy into new ways of promoting your brand on social media.