The market does not have much space for those people who believe they don’t need to advertise or engage using social media. According to Forbes, about 90% of startups fail in their first year. Creating the right social media strategy is a must for anyone who wants to be in that successful top 10%. If you are just getting started, here are some tips to execute the perfect basic social media strategy for your startup.

Start First. Create Those Accounts Second.

If you are starting up a new busines, chances are you’ve got a lot of excitement and energy aimed at your new venture. You may be trying to dial in the details on whatever product or services you’re offering, or perhaps you’re into the quantitative side and are spending time researching the state of the current market. If so, you may be tempted to immediately create and share accounts on all the large, well-known social media platforms. Though this set up is simple and quick, you need to have an understanding of your social media strategy before your business is even on social media. Wait until you’ve created some goals and have put together some engaging content before you request people to “like” you. Without doing so, any early account followers you gain may lose interest.

Write Down Your Goals

Writing out goals is a must as part of a strong social media strategy for startups. Do you want to engage teenagers? Are you trying to target working moms? As a business owner, you need to know who your audience is and what you would like to get out of them. Ask yourself such questions as what you want your startup to accomplish, then write down the steps you will have to take to get there. Now that you have written them down, use them as a guide to inform how you will create your social media presence. Social media marketing will also help to ensure you are aiming these goals at your target demographic.

Create Captivating Content

Now that you have written out your startup’s goals, create engaging content that will help you achieve them. Are you selling your product directly to businesses? Are you providing a service directly to consumers? Whatever you are selling, the content you enter in social media should be relevant to your customer’s needs. Doing so ensures that customers will want not only to come back for repeat business, but they will want to share this interesting content on their own social media platforms. Creating the right content isn’t easy. You’ll need to put your knowledge of the market, trends, and your industry to use to create captivating content. Do your customers prefer short YouTube clips? Are they more likely to share an article instead of visual data? Study the social media marketing trends to ensure the content you create gets results.

Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

Now that you are logged in and sharing content, it’s time to put these platforms to good use. It used to be that a disgruntled customer would call corporate headquarters to lodge a complaint. Or worse, perhaps they would never return to that business, and the owner would never know why. Today we have the advantage of knowing what everyone is thinking at all times thanks to social media. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and Instagram will give your customers a way to contact your organization and complain, request more info, or tell you that you did a wonderful job. Though more often than not people take to social media just to gripe, this is still valuable information for you to have. These various social media platforms are a great place to gather constructive feedback. Some sites, such as Yelp, will give you the opportunity to engage with unhappy customers and attempt to make things right with them. On many social media platforms, you can resolve customer service issues, learn how to improve your products and services, and retain customers at no cost to you.

Track Your Progress

Social media platforms provide free demographic information that any 1980s marketing firm would have paid good money for. Instagram, for example, provides valuable info for free using their “Insights” option. You will learn which of your posts resulted in more followers, which created the most interactions, and which earned the most of those coveted “likes”. It breaks down the details of your followers by location, age range, and gender. This information is highly valuable. If Instagram is showing you that women ages 40-45 tend to like and share a specific piece of content, then you can use these specifics to keep create new content that keeps them coming back. If posting a picture of a puppy resulted in a bump in followers and an increase in sales, then use this information to achieve the same with future posts.

Though creating a social media presence my be simple, creating a social media strategy will take some work. It is not just as easy as creating accounts and asking for “likes” and “shares”. That may be a great way to announce your startup’s presence, but the goal of the social media strategy for startups needs to be about more than just that. You are not just trying to get followers and interaction when it comes to social media marketing. You want to ensure that those who are interacting on the various social media platforms are turning into customers. With clear goals, great content, and plenty of customer feedback, you will be armed with helpful information that you can use to grow your startup and avoid being one of the dreaded 90%

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Marketing Chatters team has web designers, bloggers, and influencers talking about online marketing, web and social media. The purpose of this blog is to share easy tips and tricks along with best services and products recommendations.

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