There’s no denying the power of social media in today’s business world. The use of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has helped businesses gain customers, connect with their customers, and receive helpful feedback. Today’s consumers are looking for instantaneous communication, easily accessible information, and fast results.
With the use of social media in business, startups can do this for their customers very quickly. The best way to utilize the tools that social media has to offer is to create a social media strategy and watch for trends. You’ll decide on your goals, discover your demographic, schedule out your posts, watch for trends, and adjust them as you learn.
Goals
Identifying your goals as a company and your specific goals for your social media presence will aid in the direction your social media map is going. As a startup you’d probably like to gain exposure, pull in an audience, and keep their attention.
Write down your goals in order to come back and revisit them once you’ve watched trends and made a note of the difference social media is making for your business. Be sure that your goals are ambitious but realistic. An active social media presence is a must-have, but it’s not going to turn your startup into a self-sustaining business overnight. Some great goals to consider are:
- Create consistent or growing user engagement
- See increased website traffic
- See a correlation between user engagement and sales
Social Media Mapping Infographic
Demographic
Narrowing down your demographic is a great way to interact with your clientele appropriately and effectively. Decide on your target demographic in order to create your voice, design, and content that will go into your social media presence. The more your target demographic can identify with your brand, the more likely you are to make a connection with that audience.
The older your business becomes the more you will start to learn about your actual demographic, and that might not be exactly what you envisioned, but until then you’ll have to appeal to you’ll have to appeal to the audience you are envisioning. For instance, if your demographic is an older audience, you might not want to use a lot of younger vernacular or references that your audience might not understand.
Schedule
After you’ve created goals for yourself and figured out your demographic, it’s time to put your plan into action. The most important aspect to effective social media use is to be consistent. Map out your social media plan every month. Be sure to schedule posts, time to answer comments and find followers, and create promotions.
Posting consistently and often is the key to keeping the attention of your customers. Be sure to ask for action in your posts and request that your followers “like,” “share,” or “retweet” your statuses or tweets, it has been shown to increase your chance of engagement.
Because you’ll need to do keep track of your startup’s social media, be sure to download the appropriate apps in case you aren’t around a computer to post something. The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is an example of a smartphone with a large display and stylus pen to help you most quickly and efficiently. This way you’ll be able to post and keep track of your responses easily with this technology in your pocket.
Otherwise, making sure to be near your computer at a consistent rate to communicate with your audience is necessary. It isn’t enough just to schedule out posts, you’ll need to interact as well.
Watch Trends
After a few months of consistently posting and engaging with your audience, you’ll be able to keep track of trends on your pages. You have the ability to watch your growth on many of these social media platforms. Followerwonk is a great way to track follows and unfollows on Twitter, find out when the majority of your users are online so you can post during peak times, and your rate of engagement. Follows are great, but people interacting with your posts are better.
Find out what people are liking, sharing, and commenting on and post more of that type of content.
Facebook offers a pretty sophisticated set of analytics in order for you to have a better look at your metrics.
Watch your page likes and unlikes and correlate them with certain posts. Keep an eye on your reach, especially if you’re paying for advertising on Facebook to make sure your investment is paying off. Keep a close eye on these metrics and how they correlate to what you are posting on that day, what time you’re posting, and the type of people engaging with your posts.
Adjust
Watching your trends gives you the opportunity to adjust for the issues you come across. This can mean a number of different changes and some trial and error, but adjusting to fix a slump in followers, people unliking your page, or your posts not having enough reach is a must. Making adjustments will most likely be a constant process throughout your experience in social media.
Mapping out your plan and adjusting for unforeseen issues is just a natural part of any client interaction and process for business growth. Be sure to allow for enough time in your trend following making sure you’re seeing actual trends and not outliers. At the startup phase, it’s best to check up and reevaluate every three months so you’re familiar with the natural variation.
Look back at your goals and see where you are in completing them and adjust accordingly.
Startup businesses take up a lot of time and energy and often feel like children to the businessperson who is running it. Fortunately, building a social media presence is one of the most exciting and rewarding parts of this venture. It allows you to connect with your audience and watch your presence make an impact.
You’ll gain so much and learn a ton about your business through these platforms in a way that wasn’t possible before. Mapping out this plan will be highly rewarding and greatly beneficial to the needy child that is your startup business.
[Main image: iStockphoto, Marko Skrbic; Infographic: courtesy of Villanova School of Business]
Chelsy is a writer from Montana who is now living in Boise, Idaho. She graduated with her journalism degree in 2012 from the University of Montana. She enjoys cold coffee, spending time with her animals, and listening to talk radio.
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