Social Media Tips for Startups

 

Unless you're a big company with the resources to plow full speed ahead into every potentially viable social platform, chances are you're better to focus on one or two “core” social networks first. It's better to excel on a couple of social networks than be mediocre on five or six, and while social media is (mostly) free, your time is valuable. Indeed, depending on the type of business you run, not every social media site is going to suit your marketing, your audience, or what you are trying to achieve. To help you decide where to begin, identify which social networks your target audience already "hangs out" or use customer personas and research of social network demographics to judge where you will best be received. Joining Facebook and Twitter is often a given for brands simply due to their sheer size and influence, but more "niche" communities with their own unique attributes - still with hundreds of millions of users, mind you - like Pinterest, Instagram, or LinkedIn, might be where you find can make an impact more successfully. You'll learn all about what each particular social network brings to the table as they are introduced in the chapters to come, but to start off, experiment with a couple of social networks where you can invest some significant time, track your progress, and then either build on your achievements with them, or steadily begin to experiment with other platforms on which you might have additional (or better) success.