Social Media For Startups: A Practical Guide
Or How to Be Good at Twitter and Facebook
When we first started CodeCombat, we made the decision to invest more heavily in social media than we had for our first company. There was only one problem: we had spent the last 5 years actively avoiding Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and their ilk, and as I read through articles with titles like “5 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers in a Month” I began to feel like a explorer on some alien world. There was so much assumed prior knowledge that most articles proved useless. We didn’t have ANY followers, so all the articles about increasing your followers were useless to us. We just wanted to look good on social social media without wasting a bunch of our time.
This brought up basic questions about how to get started, like what do people want to read from a company? How do we get people to click our “follow” button? And then, how do we keep conversations going once started? This isn’t social media rocket science. What follows is a set of practical, actionable steps we took to go from 0 to 1,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter, and G+.
Step #1: Find Content
After reading dozens of articles, I came to the conclusion that for companies that don’t have bunches of events, product launches, advertising, and buzz, “social media marketing” amounts to posting links to news stories. Later on, you can get fancy and do testing to figure out what your customers really want to read, but early on you don’t have customers and your product is probably pretty lame. Your mom and dad will be encouraging when you post “The contact form now works again!” but strangers on the internet don’t care.
So, you need to find relevant content. You can find relevant content in one of two ways; you can either produce it yourself or scrape it from elsewhere. The first option is definitely more compelling. It enables you to brand your company as the source of some useful stream of information. If you are a company selling used furniture, you could write a hundred articles about evaluating Craigslist finds. If your company makes software to motivate sales teams, you could write 50 posts a year about the metrics that best engage salesmen. You get the picture.
The problem with producing your own content is that it’s costly. Very costly. Producing valuable, well-researched content for your customers could easily be someone’s full time job, and if you are a founder, your time is probably better spent elsewhere. I didn’t research it fully, but you might be able to get away with contracting content creation out to a writer, but that would be costly. There’s also the quality problem. For a content strategy to really add value to your business, the author needs to be a content expert as well as a compelling writer and you typically won’t find those people on sites like Elance selling their time for $8/hr.
So if you are an early stage startup, you probably don’t have the time to write your own high quality content or the money to get an expert to write it for you. That leaves you with finding and reposting other people’s compelling content.
This turns out to be simpler than it sounds. Here’s how to find content:
Go to Google Alerts, setup a bunch of keywords that relate to your niche. Set the alerts to real time and be specific, you don’t want to read a deluge of content and your future followers don’t want you to spam their feeds. So don’t get alerts for phrases like “women’s fashion,” search instead for “Herve leger dresses” or “Emmy outfits.” For CodeCombat I have about 2 dozen alerts setup, some of which are “learn to code,” “learn to program,” and “teaching kids to code.” I only get a few alerts a month for each keyword, but it’s enough.
Step #2: Curating Your Content
Now that you have your Google Alerts setup, you can go get a coffee, or you know, work on your startup. When you get your first alert, read the content carefully and decide whether you’d want to read it if someone else emailed it to you. That’s the basic test: you want to make sure the content you’re posting is high quality and interesting to someone who might be interested in what you are building.
After you’ve found your first article, you need to create a short and unique description. You can always retweet or repost what others have already found, but it works best to develop your company’s own tone and style. Gawker might post an article about a celebrity fashion faux paus with the title “Brittany crashes another party with trashy outfit and boob job” but if you’re running a website of curated plastic surgeon recommendations, your readership is probably more conservative. In that case, you might post the same article with a different description “Our doctors won’t make you look like this >link<“ for instance. You’ll need to experiment with your titles to see what your readers actually like, but treat your descriptions as your value add to readers.
You’ll notice that a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook (but mainly Twitter) often post links without descriptions. It comes down to a matter of style, but I would personally recommend against that. Posting a link (especially a link that has been shortened) doesn’t give your readers any idea what they will get by clicking. And as every internet denizen has discovered, an inappropriate or NSFW link opened at the wrong time can damage reputations. In addition, short descriptions enable you to focus reader attention on a controversy or interesting tidbit that heightens interest in what you are posting.
Step #3: Building an Initial Following
When you first start your company’s social media accounts, you’ll have 0 followers. That looks bad, but don’t worry, it’s surprisingly easy to get your first few followers. All you need to do is create a list of influential people in your space and follow them all. You should do this anyways, without any hope of collecting followers, because these people will act as a personal source of niche news and updates. But following others will often result in a few people following you in return.
Over time, you should follow both people that follow you (reciprocity) and other industry mavens/interesting people you meet along the way. I recommend being organic and genuine about your following habits. There will be a few people in your industry you should follow regardless of your personal feelings about them, but by and large, you should follow people you respect and are interested in. Don’t be afraid to un-follow/un-friend people if they are spamming your feed. Just as you will be respective of your follower’s feeds, others should respect yours.
Step #4: Choosing Your Platforms & Posting
So now that you have your content and your description, you need to post it somewhere. I’ll let you in on a secret: Facebook and Twitter are really the only two networks you have to worry about for a consumer-facing web/mobile app. There are others of course (Google+, Disapora, LinkedIn, etc), and there are certainly sites you should be aware of for specific verticals, but in terms of broad consumer engagement, there are just those two. I’ve run social media for two startups, and Facebook gets about 10x the engagement as Twitter, and everything else is negligible.
Now that we’ve decided to post your precious content to Facebook and Twitter, wouldn’t it be nice if you could post to both at the same time? The answer is yes. Later on, you can tailor your message to platforms and channels within those platforms, but for a new company with no traction or followers, cross posting is the most economical. There are a bunch of social media managers/dashboards, but the one I personally recommend is Hootsuite. Just pony up the $9.99/mo and get started, using the site will save you far more than $9.99 in your time and the ease of use will encourage you to post more frequently.
Setting up a Hootsuite account is as easy as logging into your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and once you’re in, you can choose which networks to post content to.
Step #5: Timing and Follow-through
When you first get started, it will feel like you are talking to an empty auditorium. Don’t worry, that’s normal. The truth is that nobody else will care too much whether you have 10 or 100 followers at first, below a certain follower threshold the choice to follow you will be based solely on the appearance of activity and quality. If you are posting regularly (we’ll get to timing in a moment), and the links/discussions are interesting, you stand a good chance of attracting people to follow your company’s account.
Timing your posts is important, but nowhere near as important as social media pundits would have you believe. Unless you have a huge reach, the difference between posting at 2PM on a Tuesday and 8AM on a Friday will be negligible, consistency is most important. You don’t want to post too much or too little, I think the sweet spot is about 1-2x per day, although it doesn’t seem to matter if you miss a day or two here and there or double up on busy days. Basically, you are walking a fine line between frequently reminding followers that your company is alive and well and spamming them.
So you should be shooting for one or two posts a day, but how do you keep that up? Simple, you dedicate a little time every day to reading other people’s posts/tweets, responding, and posting your own material. Use the Hootsuite scheduler to post content that is less time sensitive a few days out so that you can skip days now and then. The scheduler also lets you relax on the weekends or vacation and continue to appear active.
Step #6: Engaging
You should have a few columns in Hootsuite, posts from people you are following and mentions. You want both because you’ll want to engage with people in your space. If you see someone asking a question you could answer, don’t worry that you don’t know the person, just be polite and helpful. If a competitor makes an positive press announcement, congratulate them. Basically be a nice neighbor.
When you actually get people interacting with your company, be timely about responding. People use Facebook and Twitter like email in many cases, and so a portion of any established company’s customer support occurs through those channels. Keep an eye out for mentions/introductions, and be proactive about responding to them.
Conclusion
What do all this get you? I honestly can’t vouch for any of this having positive ROI. I mentioned at the beginning that I had avoided social networking for years prior to this new startup precisely because it seemed like silly, low-value communication. I know now that it’s only 99% silly, low-value communication. Most tweets and Facebook posts are distractions and I am careful to time box my social networking every day so that I can actually get stuff done. But there are occasionally useful bits of information on social networks that you couldn’t get elsewhere, and if you plan to make your product engaging/sticky (especially for young people), some level of engagement on Facebook and Twitter will benefit your company.
So that’s how I’ve learned to run our social media presence, if you have anything to add, by all means leave a comment, I’m still a newbie!
