When you’re a new startup company, outsourcing your SaaS marketing is a great way to get your foot in the digital door. But even if you choose to outsource the majority of the grunt work, there are still aspects of marketing that you can work on from home. Building your brand image on social media platforms will take your business from the concept room to reality. In today’s day and age, if a business doesn’t exist online, it practically doesn’t exist. Establishing a powerful social media presence right from the start is like giving your business a full-ride university scholarship: it gives your business access to people and resources which can continue pulling your company through the social ranks.
Kicking Off with Good Social Media Marketing Choices
Twitter
Twitter is a popular microblogging platform for shooting quick thoughts into the world at 140 characters or less. If you plan to use Twitter to grow your business, plan ahead what type of tweets you hope to post regularly. Twitter is a social media platform that consumers are meant to scroll through quickly, learning just a bit about a lot of things.
Let’s be honest: how many Twitter accounts for big businesses do you follow? Of the ones you do follow, how many would you follow if they only used Twitter to post fake-sounding inspirational quotes that lead into ads about their product? If you use Twitter, aim for calls of action that can directly benefit your audience. Hit potential customers with a sense of urgency. For example, “Use coupon code for 20% winter season discount, today only” is a short message that may result in bringing customers to your website, making purchases before the day is out.
Instagram
Instagram, similar to Twitter, is built to share brief posts and offer a scrollable feed. You should consider Instagram if you have a very visual product, and if you don’t have a product that’s visually impressive, you need to focus on fixing that. Visual posts help to tell a story, which in turn creates an identity for your brand.
Also, digest this – Instagram is notable for having a very high average engagement rate. People like pictures, and people are more likely to interact on picture-based content by either liking, sharing, or commenting, and this spreads awareness of your brand and brand identity. Take the time to learn Instagram and post high-quality content, and you’ll start attracting followers.
LinkedIn
If you are a B2B startup, then LinkedIn will be the most powerful social media platform for you and your needs. LinkedIn is built for businesses and is a website people visit expecting to see information about companies and their products, rather than cat videos and memes. Your audience is here and looking for your content: you just need to provide it to them. Use LinkedIn to make connections with people you know, share content, improve your brand awareness, generate leads, and most importantly drive organic traffic to your company website.
Your LinkedIn page should feature content about your business, and you should take the time to set your page up before you start inviting people to your page. Pages that are complete are much more likely to be discovered and interacted with than unfinished pages. Make a good impression with an informative page and start posting content about your brand to an audience who actually wants to see it.
Posts To Get You Started
Not sure what to start posting on social media? Here are some tips!
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Spotlight your employees. Post photos of your team online (with your employees’ consent, of course) so your audience can put faces to your company and see you as human beings who care about them and want to solve their problems, not as a cold and greedy business who wants to gobble their money.
Above all, strive to produce content that enhances your audience’s experience rather than interrupts it. Be classy, not invasive, and put out posts and photos that fit your brand’s identity without coming across as a commercial. If you want your social media presence to connect with humans, then use social media to make your brand feel real and human too.
Find Your Competitors Online
Social media isn’t an empty void with only you and your audience floating around inside it, and imitating others isn’t just for the Kindergarten playground. When it comes to social media, you should never plagiarize your competitors’ content, but you can certainly browse the web and watch how your competitors handle their social media marketing. If you are a B2B startup, your competitors might not be posting often on social media because their goal is not to reach the general public, but to reach other businesses. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing on their social media accounts you can learn from.
What to look for:
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Which social media platform seems to be the “home base” of each of your competitors? If you were a consumer, would the content they produce appeal to you? Does it leave you asking questions about their business?
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What type of audience is your competitor targeting?
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What hashtags are your competitors using?
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What news do your competitors respond to? Why is that news relevant to their business and what type of response does it generate?
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What buzzwords do your competitors throw around in their posts?
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Do your competitors respond to comments and questions left on their social media? What do people ask, and how can you use your own social media to answer those questions for your customer base?
Study the social media marketing of businesses large and small. Seek out companies you’ve never heard of or know only vague information about. If you can identify what works for one company and what doesn’t work for another, you’ll be in a strong position to steer your own business towards growth.
I’m Megan Killion and I’m here to be all-in with you and your business, ready to pull you from the shadows and into the spotlight. Browse my services online and contact me at (407)-706-4700 when you’re ready to scale your company with high-quality startup marketing.
