How Startup Growth & Social Media Work Together

There are many steps to starting a business, but once you get the ball rolling, one of your main concerns is probably getting attention for your business in order to grow and expand. This can be an expensive and time-consuming process, depending on the extent of your marketing team.

It can also be stressful if you’re not gaining traction fast enough. However, with social media, you can take marketing for your startup into your own hands. 

For small businesses, in particular, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which have about 500 million users, are an invaluable resource for gaining exposure. These outlets provide you with a direct way to be present and reach out to potential customers, either in your community or your field of business.

Social media can not only connect you with consumers, but it can also be used to help understand what your audience is looking for. The following are ways that startups grow through their use of social media:  

1. Building Your Brand 

Before you start expanding your business, however, it’s important to ensure you have all of your bases covered to avoid potential scandals once your business becomes a larger part of a community. This means paying your employees a living wage, making sure eligible employees are ensured through workers comp, and taking preventative measures to secure your physical and online businesses.  

Recommended: 3 Ways To Use Social Media For Growth and Success in Your Startup [Lessons Learned in the last 8 years]

To grow your startup, you need to build your brand both online and in your community. The main method that small businesses and marketers use to do this is through public advertising.

For local brick and mortar stores, this may entail posting and handing out flyers, buying commercial time on local channels, purchasing billboard space, sponsoring community events, or hosting small in-store events.  

However, digital marketing is another exceptionally effective way to grow your business. If your startup is an online business or your target audience spends a lot of time online, you’ll need to focus on your web presence: your website, social media biographies, content marketing, and consumer engagement. However, before you can focus on these areas, there are a few other concepts to strategize.  

2. Pick Your Niche 

Although you may know exactly what your business provides, you should consider the way you want to market what you have to offer. It’s important to talk about your products or services in a way that people who are looking for these things feel that you’re talking to them, which will make them feel inclined to pay attention to your brand.  

This will also convince potential customers that you know what you’re doing and that you do it well. A startup that only focuses on one specific area seems more credible than a business that tries to do several different things that require very specific skill sets. Although it may sound counterintuitive, in order to be successful, you need to narrow down your audience.  

3. Determine Your Audience 

Knowing exactly who your audience is isn’t as simple as saying they’re the people who need your products and services. Your startup’s particular qualities and characteristic should appeal to specific people that need exactly what you’re selling. Do you appeal to the upper class or lower class? Are your products or services better suited for busy people, or those with a lot of time on their hands? 

These are the type of questions that will help you figure out how to market to your audience. As you answer these questions, it can help to create the exact person you’re marketing to so you can better understand what they would or wouldn’t go for. You can use this insight to better appeal to your potential customers. 

4. Communicate Authority 

Once you’ve discovered your exact target audience, you can use social sites like Facebook and Instagram to sponsor ads that will go directly to the pages of your target demographic. The prices for these ads are determined either by the number of clicks they receive or the amount of attention or views that they get from users. 

Although your daily content posts should contain valuable content for your audience, it’s even more important to provide good, valuable content on sponsored posts in order to communicate your authority to people who may not know anything about your company. This means including information that will not only intrigue them but make them want to follow you as well. 

5. Be Authentic 

In order to get and keep the attention of potential customers, it’s important to add a voice to your social media content marketing. Social media users are pretty discerning when it comes to content, and if your posts are simply an ad, rather than a helpful post that sounds like it’s coming from a human, you likely won’t keep their attention for long.  

Figuring out your audience will help with finding the right voice for your social media posting, and it can even help you hire a social media expert that is in your target audience who will know exactly the types of captions that will attract customers. You’ll need to have a consistent tone and personality shine through each social media platform that you’re using.  

6. Be Consistent 

Apart from consistency in your voice throughout your social media platforms, it’s also important to remain consistent with the frequency of your posts.

Whether they are on your website or Instagram, your engagement will definitely go down if you’re not posting regularly, and it will also affect the level of credibility your followers will attribute to your business.  

Putting out content regularly will increase your engagement and let your followers and customers know that you have plenty to share with them and that you are reliable. If you’re using social media to boost the growth of your startup, it’s crucial that you are consistent in your posting and in the voice you use throughout your posts.  

7. Encourage Engagement 

There are several different ways to encourage the engagement of your social media channels. The basic concept is to be social and form relationships with your audience, which will help build trust between your social media channels and potential customers.

By communicating directly with customers, you’ll encourage them to ask questions if they have them, which could encourage them to use your company’s products or services.  

A few ways to promote engagement in your social media platforms are by: 

• Responding to comments and questions users leave on your posts. 
• Responding to direct messages users send you requesting information. 
• Creating giveaways for customers who engage with or share your posts. 
• Creating polls on Instagram or Fac
• ebook asking users for their opinions or preferences. 
• Going live on these channe
• ls so users can put a face to the brand and ask any questions they might have about the company. 

Growing a new business can be a challenge, but by utilizing an effective social media campaign, you can build a following that will attract customers and strengthen your brand. A dedicated following will not only boost your business’s visibility and reputation, you’ll also be able to utilize this audience to improve future product designs and services with direct feedback from them. 

Although there are several details that need to be explored in this process, connecting with your target audience through social media should be your main goal with social media marketing.  

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