12 Best Social Media Marketing Tips For Startups Growth

Starting a new business? Don’t worry. In this social article, I have laid out 12 essential tips to help you grow your startup’s brand awareness.

Social media is great when it comes to building a personal brand. This is because of how easy it is to connect to people. You can find people from all walks of life, different interests and personalities.

If your business is new, building a brand and creating awareness is the crucial part to become successful.

Besides the advantages, there are other disadvantages of social media marketing for business as well.

Here Are Social Media Tips To Grow Startups:

1. Identify Your Market And Target Audiences

This is the first and most important social marketing strategy you should do when using social media to promote your startups.

You should have a deep understanding of your market and target audiences.

Some important metrics to keep in mind are:

• Location
• Demographics
• Interests
• Who are the people/your competitors your ideal customers are following
• How often does your target market spend on social media
• Other online behaviors on social media and other platforms

The reason why should keep these metrics in mind is that in order to become successful in building social media presence, you have to be specific and come up with your own strategies and plans.

Strategies are different from business to business, however, the fundamentals always remain the same.

2. Pick Out The Right Platform

After you have identified and understand your ideal customers, next you have to understand what is the platform your audiences hang out on the most.

According to the stats, The average person has 7 social media accounts. But there will always be one platform that your customers use the most.

For example, the majority of Instagram and Pinterest users are female whereas most B2B business owners are active on LinkedIn the most.

Which Platform Is For What Type Of Business?

• Facebook – Facebook is actually a multi-purpose social media platform that works well for both service type as well as product type. But works better if you sell products rather than services.
• Instagram – Instagram, because it’s a pictures sharing platform, it is preferred if your business sells products.
• Twitter – Twitter, due to its limited writing feature, it is best suited for updating small status about your business and connecting with like-minded people. (It’s the first platform for my business).
• LinkedIn – Everyone knows LinkedIn as a platform for finding work. But little do many people know that it’s actually a very powerful tool to connect with people with a business background. This is the most suited platform if you sell services.
• Pinterest – Due to its similarity with Instagram (pictures sharing platform), it’s suited for product type business.

The purpose of these tips is not to prevent you from being active on multiple social accounts but to rather focus on only one platform.

3. Create Social Media Marketing Plans

Once you’ve done your research and picked out the right platform, next is to draft out and create clear plans and strategies to generate new leads and build an online presence

Set weekly and monthly goals such as acquiring ten new followers, expanding your reach by three percent, or communicating with twenty potential customers.

4. Content Is King

In order to become successful in social marketing, content is the king. As you know, millions of content are being posted each day on social media, most of which are irrelevant.

One thing to keep in mind is when you post content, don’t aim for likes or follows, rather aim for comments (fruitful comments).

It requires more effort to give comments than to give a like or to follow. Therefore, if people comment on your content, then you are definitely posting the right thing.

Test out different content to share. Observe how people interact with your social content and once you found the right one, it’s time to move on to the next step.

5. Post Content Regularly

Regularity is the key factor to become successful in social media marketing.

People on social media love consistency. It is, in fact, another important social media tips for any startups or small businesses

This is because the world of social media changes all the time. One day you are the authority in your space, the other, someone else may take over the position. People on social media love something new and trending.

By posting content regularly and consistently, you build that kind of fan-base audience and brand loyalty.

The key idea to consistency is to make use of a social media algorithm which in 2019, heavily focuses on engagement. So one of the ways to leverage engagement is to be regular when it comes to putting out content.

6. Make Use Of Social Media Marketing Tools

As mentioned above, in order to grow your startups, posting regularly is the key.

But it can be a tedious job if you need to do it on multiple social media accounts like Twitter, Instagram, etc, with tons of content.

Marketing automation tools can help you schedule and deploy social media updates from one single dashboard.

A few notable examples of top social media tools are:

• Hootsuite​
• Buffer
• Hubspot
• Social Flow

You can’t go wrong with any of the products listed above. Do your own research to see which marketing automation software is the right fit for you.

7. Make Sure Contents Are Valuable And Engaging

Irrespective of the social media platform you are using, the rule of thumb remains the same- Content is king.

One of the top social media tips for small businesses is to ace your content strategy and create content that adds value to your audience.

Make sure your contents are unique and stand out from the crowd. As mentioned above, people on social media love something new and trending.

Put time and effort into creating each content. Don’t use stock images that thousands of people are using.

They are boring and don’t add up to the value. Use tools like Canva, which allows you to create custom social media posts for any platform in just under 5 minutes, yet looks professional.

Here things you can add to your social media marketing efforts :

• Add your brand or business logo to your profile
• Follow a brand color palette for your social media feed
• Follow a consistent style or tone of language that goes with your brand

Apart from the values, make sure your content is engaging. Q&A posts and videos are two of the examples that require users’ engagement. Videos are a trend these days. Make sure you focus on that as well.

Check out my video marketing guide to learn more.

8. Use The Same Handle On Every Platform

After you have put out valuable and engaging content regularly, you would want to track and measure what kind of content works well what doesn’t

This is crucial to successful marketing strategies and your overall plan on social media as it can help you focus on what type of content works well on your business, thus increasing awareness and engagement rate.

How to analyze what works for you

1. Analyze competitors in your niche what type of content is doing well for them
2. Analyze your own content and monitor what works what doesn’t
3. Identify the sweet spot or the similarity between your situation and your competitors
4. Do the split testing by posting different types of content which you think are working

Once you have figured this out, you may want to stick the same type of content across multiple social channels that you are on.

9. Find The Best Time To Post Content

Another one of the top social media marketing tips to remember is to post your content when audience activity is at a peak. After all, what is the point of posting content when the audience is not even active?

If you are putting in so much effort, time and money into creating good quality content but your audience does not even view it, then you are at a loss.

Take note of the days and time points during the day when your audience is most active. Post your content based on this expected peak activity on platforms. This will allow for more reach and more engagement with your brand.

Find out the right time to post on each of the marketing platforms you are using and build a content scheduling strategy accordingly. (Click here to know the best time to post your content on different social media platforms)

10. Actively Engage With Audiences

To consistently grow your social media presence is to actively engage with your followers.

Once you have a couple of fan-base and audiences of your brand or startup, you have to be active in replying to comments, listen to feedback, etc. – Put your audiences first and let them know that you care for them.

In business, it ultimately boils down to trust. By letting your customers know that you are with them makes them trust you more and see you more than just a business that only focuses on selling things.

This helps in creating connections and learn what your customers truly want from you. To enhance more engagement, join groups or create groups, where you can actively interact with your target audience.

Build a community around your brand and constantly engage with your community and brand to develop a better connection with your audience.

This will help in building brand loyalty and lead to better conversion rates.

11. Build A Brand Message

Building a brand message should be your ultimate business goal.

After sometimes in social media marketing, you should be able to identify what you truly want to convey to the people.

This can be achieved by knowing your business goal and what your audiences want. Then find that overlapping spot which agrees on the same point

Pick a message and go with it. Then, you simply study the language of your consumer. Speak to them in their language and eventually, you will be able to come up with a message that truly represents your business.

12. Contribute

That’s right. Contribute! Contributing here doesn’t mean donating money or products to your followers.

The meaning here is to give back something valuable, something worth remembering about you.

It could be a giveaway or free services or products in exchange for something.

It could also be helping your competitors or like-minded people with your type of business gaining more follows or likes.

To keep it simple, it’s like karma. You receive back what you give. Trust me, initially, I didn’t believe this would work out until I started helping my fellow entrepreneurs.

We kept helping each other along the way until we reach our goal. It’s always better to work together than to work alone.

Conclusion

That’s all for social media tips for startups and small businesses. I hope you have gained something valuable from this article.

Make sure you apply the strategies in order to help you grow your brand in a systematic way. The tips are applicable to all types of business, no matter how big or small your business is.

Apart from this, you should keep in mind one thing that social media is not built for business. So when you put out content, make sure they are entertaining enough and not only focuses on promoting your business.

So are you a fan of social media marketing? Let me know your success stories in the comment section.

If you like the content, help me share it out with the world!