The best news about starting-up in today’s digital landscape is that you grow at practically no cost. All you need is the right idea, at the right time and to be at the right place at the right time. Today’s army of social media bloggers and micro-bloggers are constantly looking for exciting things to post, and you can be the subject of their social media conversations. But the first things you should think about are employing a social media management tool and building a smart social media marketing strategy. While building a social media strategy, here are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself.
Who are you trying to reach?
What are the characteristics of these people? What drives them? What concerns them?
Where do they live?
What gender, economic level, education level do they belong to?
Are they homeowners or renters? Students or working professionals?
Do they play football? Are they bikers? Do they attend music concerts regularly?
Once you know exactly who you’re targeting, you will know exactly what to post. Here are 12 types of content that you should post on social media for your startup.
1. Humorous content
Funny always works. If you can make your audience laugh, they’ll want to know who you are and what you do. It’s natural to be curious about someone who surprises or entertains you. So make your audience laugh. You get extra brownie points for sharing humorous content that’s directly related to your brand, so your audience will both be entertained and made to think about your brand. Here’s an example of that strategy in play on Tinder’s vintage #Tinder post.
The reference to your brand could also be more subtle and playful, like how Birddogs does it. Look at how they’ve showcased their product (men’s shorts) in your face in such a bold yet charming manner.
Another alternative is one where you simply post a “joke of the day” or “meme of the day” by curating content from other sources. Remember to always provide necessary attribution when curating/sharing content.
2. Your product/service updates
What are the latest features on your product? What services have you restructured or added to your business? Both your customers and social media fans eagerly await new and exciting offerings that can make a difference to their lives. And that’s how you must portray your latest updates – as novel solutions to real problems. Your feature/service update in itself could be a powerful social media marketing strategy when designed and timed right. Consider, for instance, Slack’s latest emoji tweaks in the spirit of the FIFA World Cup.
How you present products and features matters. Getting presentation right requires a certain seamless coordination between your product development and social media marketing teams. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has stressed the importance of interdepartmental collaboration in his book “Hit Refresh”, supporting the suggestion with his own examples and experiments. In 2015, Satya Nadella was spotted using an iPhone at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, where he introduced his audience to the iPhone Pro – an iPhone that supports all Microsoft applications. This partnership was unexpected by welcome by the press and customers, making Nadella’s bold presentation an instant hit. Try and plan all your business activities with marketing in mind. You’ll see that it will pay off, big time.
No update is too small to share. Even design changes can make for great social media posts if you design them to be so.
3. Success stories
Just landed a well-known client? Get them onboard with your marketing. Request their permission to construct a case-study or success story using their experience with you. More often than not, clients are excited about such an opportunity considering it free press, but they usually have concerns about the safety of their confidential information. Address their worries by disclosing your marketing plan in detail, leaving no room for ambiguity. When designing your client success stories, try and get creative. Do a video case-study or success story. Conduct an interview. Keep in mind what your social media audience would want to see.
Even if you’re not B2B, you can have customer success stories of sorts. Look at clothing retailer ModCloth’s #MarriedinModCloth social media initiative. It features a brilliant collection of photographs of customers who picked ModCloth for their wedding boutique. Few strategies work as well as social proof does on social media. Enable social media fans to envision working with you or using your products.
Success stories could also entail your company’s success stories. Just got featured on a predominant publication? Share your pride and happiness with your social media audience. Just employed new interns? Introduce them to your social media audience. People love seeing the faces and minds behind any brand.
4. Customers’ opinions
People are more likely to trust the words of other people, much like themselves. And trust is an important factor for startups, especially those that are new in the market or selling novel concepts or products. For instance, Tesla, despite the overwhelmingly positive press, has always faced issues in actually selling their vehicles. This amusing review that they retweeted could be influential in convincing other potential buyers.
Sharing the opinions of happy clients emphasizes on the fact that you’re capable of taking care of clients and fulfil their needs. But it’s also equally important to find and respond to negative experiences from clients. Every negative comment that you leave unattended is a sign of your brand’s indifference to customer feedback. The great news is that negative feedback can be an opportunity to build trust with your existing and future customers.
Observe how SizzorS salon has responded to one of their customers. It’s important to be respectful while addressing your customer’s queries in the most detailed and specific way possible.
5. Tips & news for your industry
People generally appreciate updates related to their industry, because they want to stay up to date. By providing them with such news, you can become the go-to source for news and tips in the industry. Many startups invest a lot of money in having content marketers create high-quality industry related content so it can help them get search engine and social media traffic. Instead of creating 100% of your content, you can curate top-class content that has already been created. For instance MYXYTY, an internet security solutions company, often shares news and updates related to internet security in a way that appeals to their social media followers.
If you can’t spend enough time manually curating this type of content, you could curate it using a content curation app such as DrumUp. Curate relevant content on DrumUp by setting-up keywords and RSS feeds of your favorite content sources. The content you share can be anything – useful tips, major discoveries, changes in an important law – you know your industry best. Share whatever your audience would like to follow.
When sharing, if you are the first to share and attribute the source using @mentions and #tags, you are likely to benefit from the resulting exposure. DrumUp helps you execute all of this.
6. Data & insights
Data and insights are another great form of social media content to consider sharing. Data and insights are particularly nice when shared in a visual format – as graphs or infographics. They’re not very hard to create either. With the graphics editing apps available in the market today, you can easily turn research and surveys into graphical offerings for your social media audience. Even if you don’t turn it into a graph, you could use the stat to create a compelling headliner connected to your brand.
Check out, for instance, this post that Uber shared in May this year. It gives Uber users in those cities a powerful reason to consider using the service permanently instead of buying a car. Uber’s popular for sharing really interesting stats collected vis Uber rides with their social media fans.
Explore different areas in which you collect data and can turn them into interesting and engaging social media posts. Then, use them wisely.
Alternatively, you could conduct research on areas that interest your target audience and create graphs and insights that can assist them.
7. Brand mentions in media, articles etc.
“Trust is a key enabler for economic value creation,” says Philipp Kristian Diekhoner, a German entrepreneur from Singapore. And to build trust, you need to carefully design social media content that can support those goals. Brand mentions in trusted media and publications are an excellent way to build trust with the cross-section of your target audience and readers of that publication. You may also share interviews that your company’s executives participate in to establish the knowledge and expertise of your leadership and management.
It pays to mention the publication and author when they mention you, just to build relationships with journalists and publications in your industry. When creating your own blog and social media posts, you could feature these journalists and their work in turn. You could also make room for top industry websites, magazines and news agencies in your content to catch their attention.
Finally, you could design and promote PR stunts to get covered by various publications. However, ensure that it’s genuine and in tune with your brand. To celebrate Pride month, Tinder turned their office multicolored to support the Pride movement.
8. Behind the scenes content
With people as the face of your brand, your target audience is likely to connect with you more. Your target groups are also more likely to trust you when you transparently share the process or functioning of your business with them. That’s why it’s important for you to share behind the scenes content with your social media fans. So, what qualifies as behind the scenes content? A photo of you or your team at work, preparation for an event, preprocessing of your product, a photograph of your company at an offsite event are all great examples of behind the scenes content.
Here’s a particularly cute photograph of a company’s latest recruit, Piki, the so called VP of motivation. The best part about behind the scenes content is that it allows you room to share yours and your brand’s personality. So you can share whatever’s on your mind, unless it’s offensive to someone’s sentiments.
The more transparent and free-flowing your content is, the more likely your audience is to connect with it.
Note: This post will be updated to include more types of social media content for you to post for your startup. Please watch this space for more.
Feature image via Freepik.com
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