Stop Seeing Your Instagram as a brand, and Start Seeing It As a Startup ( 3 Secrets of Success)
Learn How to Apply Lean Startup on Social Media
Lean Startup is the favorite book of every entrepreneur.
It’s author Eric Ries, teaches us how to act in these times of crisis.
It teaches us how to act in times of continuous and accelerated changes.
For example, If you want to start your own business. You would have to go through a lot of problems that would frustrate the execution of your projects.
The uncertainty would be so great that we wouldn’t know what to do
Will our customers like our product?
What product does our audience want?
Will we win or lose money?
Those are the questions that all business CEO ask themselves.
Even worse,
- Imagine spending huge amounts of money to launch a product that nobody is going to buy
- Or imagine spending years designing a product that won’t succeed either.
In the end, we will have lost a lot of time and money.
Faced with this problem,
Eric Ries created a book which teaching us the solution: “The Lean Startup Methodology”.
A few years ago, those same problems are having community managers:
- Imagine working more than 6 months in an account that nobody is interested in
- Imagine investing money in account design to realize that the account won’t succeed
In the end, we will also have lost time and money as the CEO of a company.
So,
If the CEO solved his problems with the Lean Startup methodology. Why not apply that methodology to our brand?
What is Lean Startup?
To understand the lean startup methodology, and be able to apply it to our social media. First, we must understand how we built businesses in the past.
How did we act in the past?
In the past entrepreneurs invested time and money in launching products to the market.
Products that in the end would never know if they would succeed or if it was the product that the audience needed.
Launching a product to the market was a game of chance.
Many of these products ended in complete failure.
Imagine spending years building a product. And discover, at the time you launched the product, that no one wants to buy it.
However, thanks to technological advances things changed.
We no longer need to work for more than a year to launch a product to the market.
Now, we can make a product in a matter of days or hours and ensure its success in the market.
The same happens with social media. Now, We can design an instagram account in a matter of hours and know how successful it will be.
To achieve that, we will have to follow the 3 simple steps proposed by the lean startup methodology
Create
“Make Something People Want.”
Paul Graham
The first rule for every entrepreneur is that the audience is always right.
If your product doesn’t sell, it’s because the audience doesn’t need it.
As I said before,
In the past, companies invested time and money in designing products that failed because the audience didn’t care.
So what should we do instead?
The Lean Startup methodology proposes the opposite.
Don’t invest time and money in designing a product. Develop a simple product to then evaluate it on the market.
Something as simple as a Landing pages, or a simple instagram account. would be ideal
The idea is to determine what interests the audience. And then, begin to develop more sophisticated and/or sectorized products.
The same principle must be followed by the community manager
Instead of spending huge amounts of money on a designer. You can start with simple designs that serve to measure the interest of the audience
- You can make a design in canva instead of a complex design with photoshop
- You can take advantage of instagram stories instead of complex designs for the feed
Measure
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it."
Peter Drucker
Once You have implemented the small product, the next step is to measure.
The idea is to determine what the audience wants.
Through the measurements we can determine what is working or not in the market.
With the correct measurements. We can save time and money; and little by little we will create that ideal product that the audience wants.
As a community manager
Once you have published the flyers. You can take advantage of the instagram metrics to design your own experiments.
You can:
- Take advantage of the function “to vote” to determine what the audience likes most
- Encourage the audience to write you by DM or leave a comment based on what interests them
- Compare different photos with instagram statistics. You can see which photos generate more impressions, saved photos, comments, etc.
- create a live and see what the audience says about you
Learn
“ The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
Socrates
The last step is to learn.
The different measurements are useless if we can’t interpret the results.
We need to learn from our audience
Remember that the audience is always right.
The idea is designing an ideal product for the market. A product made by the audience. Not a product where we invest time and money into something that didn’t produce any results.
The same goes with the comunity manager.
Among the things you can learn is:
- The style of photos that the audience likes the most
- The colors of the brand
- The frequency and time of publication
- Our exact market niche: “location, age, gender, etc.”
What are you going to do now?
“The man who grasps principles can successfully handle his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. “
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many ways to apply Lean Startup on social media.
Perhaps this method isn’t the fastest when it comes to positioning on social media. But it’s the safest for success.
In the end, being a community manager means discover what moves your audience.
