Launching Social Media Marketing for Our Project from Scratch (Part 1)
This is article #12 of “180 Days to Startup” series documenting my entrepreneur journey. In case you want to start from the beginning, please click HERE to the first article. You can also check out what Nodis.io is looking to accomplish HERE.
My current marketing job is in the construction products industry. This is one that is very much lagging in the usage of cutting-edge marketing tools. Having a decent website and a few social media accounts would consider advance in our industry. Our company in particular is just starting to embrace the power of internet (our website is at best, horrendous). We only recently hired a marketing specialist to help us develop a plan to use social network for online exposure.
Needless to say, social media marketing was not my expertise. In fact, I don’t even use it very much in my personal life. Facebook is my only source of online network. It is useful for church communications, events, updates on friends, and instant messenging. In terms of content, I only post pictures once in a blue moon.
I knew from the get-go that going into the Nodis.io project means I will need to overcome this shortcoming to get our product exposed online. Since Facebook is the only social media account I had, I decided to use it as my primary tool. I did a lot of research and watched a number of FB advertisement videos to learn how to use it. I launched a few ads and tested different ad campaigns with targets.
Just when I was getting some results and more confidence, Facebook shadow banned me because we are a blockchain-related company. They would no longer approve my ads and had gone radio silent on my appeals. Gaining followers/likes organically practically became impossible. This event was extremely discouraging to me.
Little did I know, that was actually the best thing that could happen to us in terms of marketing.
I was forced to turned to Instagram and other sources that I wasn’t comfortable with. It was a blessing in disguise and we have gained so much more exposure than what we did on Facebook at practically zero cost.
In this article, I will just talk about Instagram as it is our biggest marketing avenue for now. I will touch on our other resources and what I have learned from using them in a later article.
Before this project, I never knew how powerful Instagram could be. I have learned that it is extremely useful in reaching farfetched audience groups as well as local communities. This is exactly the tool that we need to get Nodis.io noticed by cryptocurrency investors at a global scale.
In the beginning, I was gaining maybe 5–7 new followers a day and I thought that was good. It’s until I learned the following techniques that helped me to gain new followers at an exponential rate. In a little over 4 months, our account got to 3K followers. For a novice Instagram marketer, I feel pretty good about that.
Here are some top techniques that helped us tremendously:
- Consistently posting new content — I know other professional Instagram agencies recommended once a day or two. But it was not feasible for us since both my marketing manager and myself work full time jobs with numerous other commitments in life (e.g. I got 2 young kids). That being said, while we can’t have high quantity, we try to have consistency. We found that every new post gave us some new followers and helped to retain existing followers. In addition to that, we needed more posts to match up to the increment of followers. It’s always sketchy to see accounts with 20 posts and 10K followers.
- Follow/Unfollow — this method is around for almost as long Instagram is. Some may say that it doesn’t work anymore but I still found it effective. I only unfollow people that don’t follow me back or people that unfollowed me. If we follow each others, then I won’t unfollow them. I normally aim to follow people with at least 1000 followers so I get exposed to their network. But then I also follow my followers’ followers to tap into networks that are normally out of my reach. I used to follow 30–50 people. This helped me to gain more followers in a day than the unfollows. But as my account grew past the initial 1000 followers, I realized that just doing 30–50 follows will not get me enough exposure to have a positive net follow count (meaning more follows than unfollows in a day). I ended up having to do 300–400 follows a day and unfollow the same amount. This helped me to maintain a 20+ average of new net follows a day. Some times there are more and sometimes less but overall, the account continue to grow.
- Follower Management Apps — There are numerous apps out there that taps into Instagram API to help with managing followers. The app that I used the most is Follower Insight. It’s easy to see who the unfollowers are and who has only recently unfollowed. I especially like this app because there is no lag when I am doing the unfollowing. In some of the other apps I tried, there was always a slight delay after each time I press the unfollow button. This delay was really annoying when I tried to unfollow 300+ people.
Obviously, there are other techniques, like targeted audience contents and hashtag research. But those are common knowledge which others have wrote about already.
In my next article, I will touch on my experience with Medium, Reddit, and Telegram. We haven’t gained the same level of success in terms of gaining new followers; however, they all contributed with exposing the project online. In fact, we even hired someone new from our Reddit exposure to help us with marketing!
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