6 questions to answer before launching a social media plan

Don’t let social media be DOA for your startup.

A friendly reminder — there are over 3 billion people on social media.

Pretty sure at least a few of those are your potential customers, right?

Social media is more than posting a status that you’re open for business — it’s a tool to create excitement and engagement about your brand, a way to get to really know your customers and their thoughts on your offerings, and even better, it’s the foundation for social ads.

So, why listen to me about the need for a startup to have a social strategy? I’ve built a good part of my marketing career on social media and content strategy. I’ve led strategic efforts centered around social media and content creation for product launches, event coverage, and cross-brand promotions, and I’ve managed some big accounts for the likes of IBM and Weather Underground. Now, I’m focused on building a social and content strategy from the ground up at a startup and I want to share with y’all what we’re learning.

Pretty convincing that your startup may need a social strategy, of some sort, right? So let’s dive in into the top 6 questions you should be asking about building a social media strategy for your startup.

Can I claim this?

You may want a specific Twitter handle, but guess what. You can’t have it. Maybe someone already sits on it. Maybe it’s too many characters. Maybe it has a weird trending hashtag associated with it.

I’ve learned this lesson from a rebranding exercise for Watson Advertising during my IBM days. The name we wanted was too many characters. The backup name was taken and took a lot of negotiation and phone calls to get. It took time and if we hadn’t checked at the beginning of our planning, we may have not made the big-reveal deadline.

You’ve hopefully spent a lot of time researching company names, checking domains, claiming websites. Take a few minutes to review social media and if the name you want is available, claim it! Worse case, you change your mind and then unleash the handle back into the wild. Also do a scan of hashtags too — I’ve definitely had a hashtag that we thought would work for a business promo and when we researched it, turned out to be a popular extremist tag. Not good.

Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with add-ons to your name in social — (Quip is getquick across many platforms, even our brand, Simplr, is gosimplr across social) It may not be perfect, but it’s definitely not the end of the world if you can’t get your exact company name for a handle — adding in an action verb also adds a bit of excitement to your profile name.

Who’s job is gonna be social?

Now that you feel good about claiming some social handles, take some time to think about who’s going to be in charge of updating and maintaining your handles.

Now, I know EXACTLY what you’re thinking. ME! The founder/the first engineer/website developer! And I hear you — and in the beginning, you may be right. Someone has to upload the logo, write a bio, and link your website. But social is really a full time job. You don’t amass a giant following overnight, you need someone to respond to customers, and you need someone to come up with the witty tweets you’re imagining go viral for your brand.

I also fully understand that hiring a social manager may not be as high of a priority as say, hiring someone to engineer your dream product. Fair. But at least see if there’s an interest in social from your early hires — someone who wants to learn, or has had some experience in simple platform maintenance will save you headache down the line. Having someone who even pipes up “Yo, since we changed our website url again, shouldn’t we change our Facebook profile?” is really handy.

If you’re at a place to hire more marketing/social support, it’s important to think about where you want the social function to live. Is it something you want to your full-time marketing hires to manage? Is it something that they can add on to their plates as part of a daily function? Are you interested in hiring a contractor or even an agency to hyper focus a set amount of hours each week on your platforms?

My recommendation? Social plays a huge role in attracting the right customers. You want the person who is managing your social brand to be invested in developing those customer personas and be a master of understanding the best way to reach them. Choose a social person (or team) that can be involved deeply in building your customer personas and who can spend time every week buried deep in the platforms, optimizing and engaging.

Where I’ve seen social succeed the best is at companies that are willing and able to give the overall strategy reigns to one specific person (SMB) or one specific team (larger orgs) who are 100% the point person(s) for everything related to social.

Think of it this way — when you’re developing a product, you have a product owner. You don’t have everyone from every division trying to manage the development process. Yes, the product owner is open to feedback and seeks it, but they ultimately make the call and know the roadmap vision. You need the same for social (and for marketing, but that’s another blog post in itself).

What’s the plan?

So you made a call. You’ve figured out the resources to get someone somewhat focused on social media. Congrats!

Now the fun begins.

Take some time to think about WHY you want to have a social presence.

Do you want to showcase user generated content (UGC) of people using your product? Do you want to engage with your audience? Do you want to a place to share all your cool product updates and cool industry news? Do you want a place to users to share feedback?

There’s a lot of directions you can go, but it’s important to hone into the soul of your social mission. It can be a few things, it can be just one thing — but get the team to agree on it. It will be very helpful as you begin to develop content and strategy for each platform.

Once you decide on the purpose of your handles, now focus on what platforms you’d like to use.

Earlier you did a good job and claimed a bunch of social handles on every platform imaginable — even that weird one your 12-year-old niece is using. Do you need to use every single one of them?

NO. And for the back — NO!!!!!!

Especially if you’re starting out, don’t spread your social efforts too thin. Now is the time to really hone in on your desired customer and plan the best way to use your resources.

Where does your customer hang out? Are they sharing blogs on LinkedIn, commenting on YouTube videos, or scrolling for hours in Instagram? What type of content do your customers like? Videos, e-books, quizzes, witty Twitter posts? Where do their influencers post content? How frequently?

Forgive me for geeking, but these types of research and audits are my bread and butter. Any time I’ve stepped into a social team, this is the first thing I do — even if the brand has been established for years. Customers grow and change and it’s so important to check up on their habits frequently. If you haven’t revisited your audience in a while, you might be missing out on leveraging neat tools within platforms.

For example, for one account I managed they had a massive Instagram following — but no one had to thought to use Instagram Stories! I saw that our followers were using Instagram Stories — so, it made sense for us to at least try using them too. We ran a few Stories and guess what, followers, engagements, and interest increased — and the cross-promo buzz on all of our platforms created wins for all social channels.

As you research, you’ll begin to realize what platforms are good for your brand and which could go way-side. Maybe Snapchat isn’t right for your audience, but Instagram is. Maybe your customers are all on a platform you’ve never heard of and need to investigate. Make notes and start to prioritize where to put efforts.

Now, organize the platforms and purposes into tiers.

Tier 1: The “We’re going full in, baby” platforms.

Original content, strategies, and analytics will all be optimized for the needs of these platforms. These are your big ticket platforms and objectives. I recommend keeping this to two or three max when starting out.

Tier 2: The “We can reuse content here” platforms.

You may create some original content for these channels, but honestly you’re mostly repurposing content from the Tier 1 group. This a good home for for any “nice to have” strategies that you may not have time to build out right away, but can build the foundation for (like in gaining followers with the intention of doing Facebook Live once a month later on).

Tier 3: The “Just posting to show some activity” platforms.

These are the ones where you can spare some effort once a month to post an update or scan for comments, but you’re not actively developing anything for it. Google+ is a great example of a platform to plop down here.

And guess what — these tiers can change all the time. For one brand, I had LinkedIn as a Tier 1 platform. After a month, we realized that LinkedIn was more suited for recruiting rather than attracting new customers, so we demoted it to Tier 2. We were still reposting content from our other handles, and would make unique job posts for the platform, but we shifted our team’s energy to building original content for Instagram and Twitter. Those platforms were where our future and current customers were hanging out, which better aligned with our main social objectives.

The tiers helps social managers realize where to prioritize efforts and a strong guiding principle when coming up with strategy. For example, say you’re really into the idea of Instagram Live and insist your team does a daily Instagram Live from your co-working space. If your social manger did their research, they can come back and say “Love that you’re really into Instagram Live, but our target customer effort isn’t on Instagram. But they’re super active on Twitter. What about Periscope instead? We can run some tests to see if it gets good user engagement.” See, a good idea morphed into a great idea!

So, do I just start posting now?

Hold your horses, tiger. What do you want to post?

Now that you have the goals aligned, think about what type of content will get you there. This is the content that your social manager is able to amplify out into the internet.

I can easily quadruple the length of this post with content strategy talk, but I’ll give you some highlights to consider instead:

1. Are you going to just post original content that your team makes, or will you share content from other thought leaders, brands, new sources, etc.? What is the theme of all of this content? (Answers can vary by platform!)
2. Who is going to make this original content? What is the expectation of support to make this content? (Are you expecting high quality videos or will a program like Canva work to make blog post headers? Will you need design support to get this done?)
3. What is the desired posting frequency? Do you have enough content to keep up with this? (Can someone source cool articles to share every day of the week? Are you publishing enough blogs to fill up a social media posting schedule? Does this posting schedule align with your overall blog strategy?)

Set some foundational agreements here and feel free to adjust as your get into the throws of social posting. You may be able to produce content 10x as fast as you thought, or maybe you have to dial back after a month of struggling. Whatever you decide, try and get into a rhythm and build an expectation for content.

How do I know social is working?

Now that you’ve begun to establish your high level strategy, it’s time to determine success metrics for your social strategy.

Make the goals manageable for your social manager, but give them some oomph of course.

• Don’t say — grow followers on Instagram. Say — Get 300 new, unpaid followers for Instagram this month.
• Don’t say — Keep engagement rates up. Say — Prioritize comments, likes, then shares on Facebook engagement this month, keeping engagement rate at 3%.
• Don’t say — Get influencers to promote our stuff for free. Say — research influencer campaign best practices and reach out to 5 potential partners by the end of the month to help shape future program.

You will probably need to some research on benchmarks for your industry (I like Buffer’s resources) before setting goals, so take some time to research and set them thoughtfully.

Setting goals will help your social manager stay on track and will help them know what to report back to you on progress.

When you have a hang of the platform, I suggest start looking into native platform ads. You can create different campaigns geared towards different actions: growing followers, clicks to a specific website/blog posts, conversions, whatever it may be. You also have a lot more control over the audience and can hyper-target into your desired audience. Your social media manager may ask for some budget to test things, or some extra help, so be open to the exploration!

• Note — Yes, there’s some massive Facebook algorithm changes messing with brand reach. Will it affect other platforms? Time will tell. We’ll dive deeper into how to overcome these specific issues in another blog post.

Yeah, but how do I make this thing go viral?

Oh boy. I knew you’d ask this.

Reflecting back on my personal social accounts, I’ve gone viral. But for what?

The most recent time it’s happened, I was live tweeting during The Bachelor. My hilariously witty comment (show below) was made at the right moment, using the right hashtags, and got favorited right away from some big accounts, which ultimately pushed my tweet into the “Top” tab and then it just ran from there. My life has not changed at all because of it. I was not suddenly swamped with offers to write tweets for big brands.

Yes, I’m a loyal fan of Bachelor Nation.

It’s important to note that just because your tweet, or video, or post goes viral, it doesn’t mean you’ve cracked the code on getting business.

Yes, it’s great for brand awareness. Yes, it’s great for the personal brand of whoever authored the content. Yes, engagement and impressions are super cool to have (and important when growing a brand).

No, it does not mean you’re suddenly going to get 100,000 more customers. Sorry. Will you see an increase in business? Hopefully.

Why hopefully?

Why did your post go viral?

For a great ad that really sells your product? For being so off-brand? Just for being funny? For being a massive fail? There’s plenty of reasons for going viral. If why you went viral isn’t for a flattering reason, or you went viral with the wrong audience, well, that’s just not going to translate to money, is it?

There’s nothing wrong with going viral — it’s a key point for all the LinkedIn Growth Hackers and it’s clearly working well. All I’m asking is the purpose behind the want. For those going viral on LinkedIn, it’s not gathering views for the sake of going viral — there is definitely thought, strategy, and the drive to keep content relevant to their core business goals.

To get engagement and loyal following, viral or not, you’ve got to give your social manager the ability to explore, be creative, take risks. Give them a resources, give them encouragement, give them the ability to test.

Like a good product, your business’s social presence takes time to grow and perfect. If you rush it, or try and cut too many corners, the foundation will be weak and it’s going to have a hard time fixing that broken base.

See you on social media.

At Simplr, we’re a scrappy startup based in SF (never heard that one before I bet). We’re an eclectic group from diverse backgrounds, but we’ve all got the same mission: get this startup up and running. Part of this process? Share our processes and findings with other SMBs.

Want to learn about any of our processes? Leave a comment below and we’ll get to writing.

In the meantime, give us a check — we’re here to make sure other SMBs have access to incredible customer support services.