From 0 to 100: How to Grow Social Media Following for Start-ups
Entrepreneurs put an unbelievable amount of time and effort into building their startup brand. And, unfortunately, according to Failory startup statistics, 90% of them will fail—around 30% within the first two years. Why? Well, a variety of reasons, but over 50% of those reasons are marketing related.
At EMB, we talk to a lot of startups about how important it is to see marketing as an investment, not an expense. The days of “if you build it they will come” are way over, so marketing is a must, particularly in saturated industries. But brochures, ads, websites and collateral add up. For cash-strapped startup businesses, marketing isn’t even on the brain. And that’s the issue.
Why Startups Should Start With Social Media
Even with a nonexistent marketing budget, there’s still a solution to gaining marketing momentum: social media. With extremely few exceptions, no matter who your audience is, they’re on social media. And, for better or for worse, those social platforms are built at their core to connect users with stories, services and products tailored to their interests. Since the main social media players allow businesses to post organic content for free, all it costs is time.
It takes more than simply publishing posts to grow your online following, though. Here are six tips to get your startup started on its journey to growing an audience on social media before you ever hire a marketing agency or coordinator.
1. Research and Understand Your Audience
Just because you want to reach a big audience—and you want to know how to get social media followers—doesn't mean you should cast a wide net with your content. We call that the “spray and pray” model, and it doesn’t work. You need to know who your audience is.
It is crucial that startups first figure out their target demographic. Once you know the demographics who are most likely to like the brand, you're going to successfully reach people who engage. Knowing your audience is easier said than done, but there are plenty of ways to put together a strategy and a strong hypothesis. There are general guidelines as well. For example, if you want to reach tech professionals, X (aka Twitter) would be a better bet than Facebook. If your intended audience is stay-at-home parents, on the other hand, X would be a big waste of time.
2. Publish Content Tailored to the Platform
No matter who your audience is, you still have to diversify the social media platforms you use and the content you publish on them. You can invest more money or time into certain platforms, but you should still publish content across many different social media networks.
Make sure you post original content on every social media platform. You don't want to repeat content, because when you do, some people might choose to only follow you on one network as opposed to all of them. You want to have the most follows on every platform you use, so encourage your customers to follow by posting individualized content. On a basic level, people on Instagram probably won’t care about your latest financial report, but those on LinkedIn will.
3. Engage to Increase Shares
Find ways to engage with your employees and customers online. While it is a risk to engage with direct competitors, you should always be looking for ways to include your community in your content, including your close business partners. Here are some tips for engagement:
- Share employee biographies: When you start your social media accounts, introduce your team via posts or stories. Shoot for highly personalized content that shows your brand values and identity, like fun facts or short stories.
- Host contests or giveaways: If it makes sense for your business, try hosting a contest to increase engagement. For instance, you could offer a trial of your startup's services to one customer who shares your post on their profile or in a story.
- Establish content partnerships: Is your startup working with a nonprofit? Are they tabling at a fair or event in town? Publish a post encouraging your customers to give them a visit. By making a connection with that nonprofit, you build trust and establish brand values.
Check out these other blog posts about boosting social media engagement!
4. Use Strategic Hashtags
While marketers are a bit divided on the value of hashtags in social media content, hashtags are still an important strategy for brand new business accounts. It starts to associate your page and content with specific keywords so that the algorithms can begin to understand what you’re all about.
First of all, decide on a few hashtags—no more than five—that give the best and most well-rounded idea of what your brand is or does. Use those in as many posts as appropriate. Then, use trending hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Most social media platforms show you what content or hashtags are trending at the time so that you can create content on the fly that will resonate with a wide swath of users. Just make sure you’re not making content for content’s sake or using hashtags that will be misleading.
5. Collaborate with Other Pages
Unless you want to take a major risk, don't engage your competitors on social media. It is, however, a good idea to tag pages of noncompetitive brands and partners. Collaborative posts are a great strategy because it allows you to tap into the brand equity and trust of other pages. Here are two tips that will help you do that successfully:
- Tag brands: If you're an accounting firm that works with dental offices, for example, clothing and shoe brands are not your immediate competitors. You might try making posts that tag what makes your team smile. (Get it? It’s dental related.) Using teeth to represent statistics and numbers would also be a weird but interesting way to engage users.
- Tag the community: Wherever you're located, seek out local, non-competitive businesses that you can tag. Maybe your team can visit an art gallery on a team-building trip or host a working lunch catered by a local company in order to create content. You can find ways to make content that collaborates with other community members.
6. Run Social Media Ads
There’s no shortage of organic content you can create to engage users, tell your story and make connections. However, the truth is that if you’re only doing organic social media management, you’re not going to grow quickly. For more sustainable and reliable follow growth, you’re going to have to tap into the world of paid social media.
Whether you’re boosting your best Instagram posts with a small spend or running robust TikTok ads with a bigger budget, you’re going to be doing yourself and your following a huge favor. To be fair, running social ads can be daunting if you’re not sure what you’re doing, but fortunately most platforms have basic how-to forums that can get you started on simple brand awareness ads.
When You’re Ready to Work With an Agency
By tailoring your content to specific platforms and audiences, focusing on engagement and running ads, you’re setting up your startup for marketing success. As you grow, you’re going to want to bring aboard experts to take over. As the business owner, surely you don’t want to be mired in social media forever!
At Elevate My Brand, we’ve worked with well over 300 brands, and social media management is our bread and butter. Once you’ve done all of the setup and started to build your social following, complete our Entry Questionnaire to set up a call with our team. We’d love to walk you through our Discovery process to scale your marketing today.
This post is part of our "0 to 100" blog series where we share tips to support startups on their marketing journey. And there's a lot more where this came from! Read some of our other articles below for a fuller picture of what you need to do to prepare to work with a marketing agency in the future.
