- Sabyasachi Pal
Social Media for Start Up
There has been an interesting transformation in the business world in the past few years. Positioning itself on the list of priority, social media has moved many steps further from being a mere marketing opportunity. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become a valuable tool of brand awareness, content distribution, lead generation, and customer acquisition strategies for businesses. This has become a main concept of marketing for startups with smaller budgets and beginner campaigns. Despite of its importance, very few companies know how exactly to make the best use of the platform.
Even though the fever has taken over a decade to catch up, but the fever of Social Media has been amongst us dating back to 1997. Below are some of the examples of the popular networks that had the up rise and downfall in the last decade:
Since the year 1997, within a decade, social media has taken a major leap in the sector of marketing and the industry that has made the most out of it, are the start-ups.
Startups have the immense pressure of maximizing the revenue with the least expense. There is a fine line to be understood here. On one side it is said that there will not be a success unless the end customers know about the services and products (which takes a heavy marketing and advertising investment). On the other side, it has to be understood that spending too much on marketing campaigns will lead to a doom from the beginning. However, there lies a sweet spot in between that allows reaching the specific target with limited budget.
Through the years, the sweet spot has changed but the concept remains the same. The best marketing for a start-up with the least expense has always been word to mouth. In this process of word to mouth, the internet has paced the process to a much faster level. Social media has played a major role in spreading this word to mouth strategy like a wild fire with the click of just a button
To name some of the major social networking platforms Pintrest, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn have gained major acceptance globally in the sector of marketing for small, medium and major sized business industries. Everyone is in the run to make their place in the social media platform with the advancement in the extensive use of technology amongst the crowd of all ages.
Facts about social media:
If there is a need of concrete proof to support the fact that social media has a great value for your brand recognition, it can be found in numbers. Just the fact that Facebook is responsible for a total of 15.8% of your time spent on the internet, is a strong support for the claim. Some of the other supporting numbers are:
40% of people spend more time socializing on social media than they do face-to-face.
There are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on earth.
Over half of all mobile searches lead to a purchase.
Blogging increases web traffic by 55% for brands.
If Twitter was a country, it’d be the 12th largest in the world.
91 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn for candidate searches.
The first ad on Instagram gained Michael Kors 229,000 likes. An increase of 540% when compared to the average likes of the brand’s previous photos.
The +1 button is served more than 5 billion times per day across the web.
*as curated by rocketpost.com
The question that lies here is, “how can a start up benefit from social media by making the most efficient use of it?”
Understanding the value of strategizing and planning is what exactly needed before deciding on the channels and defining a detailed strategy to drive the focus on.
The beginner step is to define the type of brand that the company wants to be recognized as, which in relation has to be aligned with the social media approach. Whether it will be a direct approach or should the approach be more relaxed, easy going approach? This should be the main condition of social media marketing approach. The consumers, who look for consistency, can detect any strategic changes in the approach.
Choosing the right social media platform is a major factor to target the correct audience. The nature of the business, the age group of the target audience and the location of the business are important while investing on social media marketing.
Spending on the social media marketing is a tricky factor. The social media account might be free, but implementing the strategy to promote the brand always includes a cost. The trick is to find out how and where to spend in order to maximize the returns. Paying Facebook or Twitter to boost the posts will promote the page to a large number of people.
Building a community is considered one of the best platforms as it gives the opportunity to deliver messages and lets one interact with the audience, get their feedback. Blasting generic emails will lead to a loss of the interest of the audience after a certain time, but a real interaction will lead to a strong and real connection that will help in the promotion of the brand
With these implemented strategies, there is one question that needs to be discussed. “What is the assurance of social media marketing working for all business models?” Investing on social media marketing, reaching out thousands of people over the wide spread of internet web is beneficial for any company, given that the investment is done on the right target with the right content on relevant platforms.
As an entrepreneur with a start up, it is always challenging to indulge in activities with limited resources and manpower, but with the proper use of the social media tool, there is a huge scope of building a brand name with limited expenses and opening oneself to the largest pool of marketing source.
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