What Should You Post on Social Media for Your Startup?

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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What’s the Ideal Social Media Post Length?

Social media post length is a definitive factor is deciding the impact of your social media content on its viewers. Any post that is wordsmithed to fit character limits will fully display your social media content to your fans, without obscuring any information. And that is integral to earning social media engagement. With the knowledge of ideal post lengths (mentioned below) and a reliable social media management tool, you can post optimized social media posts consistently.

This blog post is a curation of research concerning post length on various social networks. Let’s begin with the biggest and most popular social media platform – Facebook.

Note – This post discusses 2 numbers –
1. The ideal length of social media posts (recommended for optimum engagement), and
2. The maximum character limits that different social platforms allow
 

The ideal Facebook post length

There are different types of posts that you can publish on Facebook – organic, paid and video. Each of those types has its own layout on Facebook and ideal post length. Here’s a short summary of posts types and their optimal lengths.

Organic posts – Between 40 and 80 characters. According to MarketingProfs, Facebook posts that are under 40 characters get 86% engagement. Jeff Bullas corroborates that research but extends the ideal character limit by stating that Facebook posts with 80 characters or less get 88% more engagement.

Paid posts – Paid posts can be broken down into a headline, a body and a link description. Here are the ideal lengths for each of those elements, according to an Adespresso study.

Ideal length of Facebook ads

• Headline – 5 words
• Text – 14 words
• Link description – 18 words

Facebook paid posts are about taking action, which is why it’s natural for copywriters to craft shorter headlines and descriptions. However, you should pay attention to copy on organic posts as well, keeping them crisp and action-prompting where possible.

If you’d like to learn more about copywriting for social media posts, here’s a useful read – 3 Secrets of Top Copywriters That Can Transform Your Content Marketing.

Facebook Character Limits or Maximum Character Lengths

If you wished to, you could publish a Facebook status that was 63,206 characters long! But that length is far from ideal. Here are a few other maximum character lengths that are noteworthy.

• Facebook username character limit – 50 characters
• Facebook Page Description – 155 Characters
• Facebook Comments – 8,000 Characters

Facebook image ads –

• Headline – 40 characters
• Text – 90 characters
• Link description – 20 characters

Facebook canvas ads –

• Text – 500 characters
• Button Text – 30 characters

Facebook lead generation ads –

• Context card headline – 45 characters
• Benefits text – 5 bullets with 80 characters each
• Button text – 25 characters
• Custom question text – 50 characters
• Privacy policy link text – 100 characters
• Custom disclaimer title – 60 characters

Facebook collection ads –

• Headline – 25 characters

The ideal length of Facebook Videos 

Facebook support video upload of upto 120 minutes, but it’s advisable to steer clear from publishing anything that long unless it’s a Facebook exclusive feature film. 44% of 30-60 sec videos are viewed completely, according to a study conducted by Kinetic Social. Plus, 33% Facebook users prefer shorter videos that are between 30-50 secs long.

The ideal length of Facebook video ads –

• Text – 90 characters
• Headline – 25 characters
• Link description – 30 characters

 

The ideal Twitter post length

In 2017, Twitter increase the character limit of tweets to 280 characters. Since then, Twitterati have become more active on the social network claims product manager Aliza Rosen. This is probably because 280 characters allows more room for Twitter users to share their thoughts. But this added space doesn’t mean that other Twitter users want to see longer tweets.

According to a study conducted by Buddy Media, the ideal tweet is less than a 100 characters long. The study finds that such tweets receive 17% more engagement. So yet again, shorter content is better received by social media users. This is partly because shorter tweets are easier to read and comprehend, but also because shorter tweets give retweeters extra room to add their thoughts.

The ideal hashtag length

According to Vanessa Doctor from hashtag.org, hashtags that are 6 characters or one word long perform better. Once again, comprehension is the concern. Hashtags don’t allow spaces and exceptionally long hashtags are hard to read and comprehend.

Twitter character limits or maximum character length for Twitter posts

• Tweets – 280 characters
• DMs (Direct Messages) – 10,000 characters
• Handle – 15 characters
• Profile name – 20 characters

In short, concise content performs better on Twitter. Note that the character limits for Twitter have been extended to allow more content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that longform content will ever be well received on the microblogging social network.

The ideal LinkedIn post length

At 500 million users and 10 million job postings, LinkedIn is a fairly noisy social media platform. As the social network grows its user base, social media marketers will find it tougher to earn organic attention via LinkedIn posts. Marketers should continue to optimize the quality, timing and delivery of LinkedIn posts so they can make the most of their brand’s LinkedIn presence.

There isn’t much research on ideal length of LinkedIn posts, so we have to rely on how posts appear on LinkedIn to decide ideal post length. For instance, if your LinkedIn status update is longer than a 100 characters, the excess text gets cut off and a Show More button appears. So it makes sense to keep your LinkedIn status updates under a 100 characters or 25 words.

• LinkedIn status update – 50-100 characters ( organic and paid)
• LinkedIn post titles – 40-49 characters (according to OkDork)
• Number of images – 8 (Source – OkDork)
• LinkedIn articles – 1900 to 2000 words (Source – OkDork)
• Article subheads – 5 per post (Source – OkDork)
• LinkedIn videos – under 30 seconds (Source – LinkedIn)

LinkedIn character limits or maximum character length for LinkedIn posts

• LinkedIn Publishing post headline – 150 characters
• LinkedIn Publishing content length ~ 120,000 characters *
• Company update – 700 characters
• Company name – 100 characters
• About us (Summary) – 2,000 characters
• Page name – 50 characters
• Company leaders headline – 150 characters
• Company leaders description – 150 characters
• Employee testimonials – 400 characters
• Custom module title – 150 characters
• Custom module body – 500 characters
• Custom module URL label – 70 characters
• First name – 20 characters
• Last name – 40 characters
• Recommendation – 3,000 characters

* As per SproutSocial’s experiment, LinkedIn cuts you off once you reach 120,000 characters on LinkedIn articles.

The ideal Instagram post length

Unlike the other social networks on this post, Instagram was built to promote visual content. However, the right combination of words and hashtags can help your Instagram posts maximum engagement, which can earn them the top position on users’ feeds.

• Instagram captions – 138 -150 characters
• Instagram ad captions – 125 characters
• Number of hashtags for captions – 5 -10

However, it’s not a great idea to add irrelevant hashtags to your posts, just to increase its visibility. That may result in your shadowban on the social network. According to TrackMaven, posts with exactly 9 hashtags receive the most engagement.

• Number of characters in a hashtag – 24 or less

If you notice the captions added by top brands on Instagram, you’ll notice that most captions run short. Most captions that perform well also create context, showcase the brand and prompt viewers to take action.

Instagram character limits or maximum character length for Instagram posts

• Instagram caption – 2,200 characters
• Bio – 150 characters
• Username – 30 characters

Wrap

Social media post length is an important factor in deciding your social media engagement. WIth an optimally worded social media post, you can make an impact on your target audience on different social media platforms. Use the info shared on this post to decide what lengths of captions and post descriptions to incorporate in your social media content.

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What a Profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy Looks Like (with 4 Real Examples)

We’ve come a long way in the last few years. Back in 2011, the biggest question that people were asking was if social was profitable. Since then, industry conversation has moved from ‘will I see an ROI’ to ‘how to measure social ROI’ and the tools that can help.

Yet, only 15% marketers have proven the impact of social media quantitatively. If you aren’t part of that 15% there could be two potential hitches – you aren’t working with a sound strategy, or you aren’t measuring the right metrics.

[ A sound strategy = targeted content + the right channels]

To eliminate the first possibility, let us study profitable social media content marketing strategies and compare them to our own.

1. ShipServ

Who’d have thought that a maritime e-commerce company would seize the social media opportunity and win at it? Shipping companies seem unlikely to be seeking information on social media, but ShipServ saw this differently. Since no one in their industry had conquered the social space, they moved in full force and established thought leadership in it.

ShipServ supplies software to support shipping companies and connects the industry’s vendors to buyers. In 2008, they were struggling with a host of marketing problems. They were selling technology to people who didn’t consider it necessary and on a limited budget. Creating that change in perception would be a huge task.

They began by studying their audience’s content consumption. They identified keyword themes to work with and planned a quarterly content and SEO strategy. A series of original content was promoted through a host of social media channels, driving traffic back to the main site. The channels they used included their blog, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and podcasts. They also ran a white-paper series and created a LinkedIn group.

The result?

400% more leads

150% more contact to lead conversions

3 month break even on the social media investment

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Study your audience. One thing that people forget to do is to study how an audience consumes content, where exactly the look for it and what they look for.

2) Consider your content competition when building out a social strategy. One of the social media marketing mistakes that people make is blind-sighting content competition. ShipServ boomed on social because none of its competitors were on it yet. You need to identify a platform that has your audience and isn’t already monopolized by your competition. You need to share content with a unique value proposition.

2. Lyfe Kitchen

For a food industry product, social media marketing may seem like the clear-cut solution. But Lyfe Kitchen is B2B, a restaurant and grocery product line. A few years ago, this company wanted to increase word of mouth on social media and rapidly expand into new supermarkets. What should their approach have been?

The company ran influencer marketing programs, but with a slightly unconventional approach. They chose influencers who belonged to their high-potential target audience across industries – health and fitness, sports, the fashion world, and moms. In addition to this effort, the company also did tastings for a national sports company and magazine editors. The sports management company loved the product so much that they convinced their clients (sports celebs) to get on board. The editors wrote articles and talked about the product on social media.

The result?

Their product distribution grew from 400 to 1400 stores within a few months of the effort. The expansion was a result of direct requests to stock the product.

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Tap into every vertical of your target audience. Don’t restrict yourself to one target demographic or group. Consider all possible consumers when creating your social media content or planning a marketing strategy.

This company considered influencers across so many verticals, from health and fitness to the fashion industry. They even included influential moms, who may have been instrumental in getting distribution to local supermarkets.

2) Look beyond the conventional. Don’t tunnel vision your marketing strategy. If you think laterally you may be able to accomplish more than just your major objective.

For instance, Lyfe Kitchen could have sent free samples to influencers or interacted with them separately. Turning the activity into an event provided a unique PR opportunity, and to make the Lyfe Kitchen experience more memorable and exciting for potential influencers.

3. Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel is a chain of American retail stores that sell home furnishings. Wait, so why did they create the ultimate wedding contest? Well, they did it to drive gift registry creation and engage new consumers in the process of it.

Participants were required to create a gift registry with Crate and Barrel to enter the contest (Note: A requirement like this one to enter a contest often introduces legal complexities). After verification of the registry, the participants could move on to the next stage – submission of a photograph and some answers to questions. The contest was then judged by public voting and a panel to pick the winner of a $100,000 fantasy wedding.

The contest was promoted on the company’s website, on-site in their stores and by advertisement.

The result?

Over 17,000 applicants, each with a minimum registry value of $2,000 (a net value of $34 million)

Direct access and engagement with the participants wedding guests, potential new customers

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Craft marketing strategies that target both current customers, and new customers through them.

Crate and Barrel could have simply worked with the contest applicants, but the registry angle increased their reach exponentially (Please consider legal complexities before creating a campaign of this sort).

The simplest version of this tactic is to share the contest post to enter (which will give you access to your audience’s connections).

2) Make your unique value proposition exciting. A dream wedding of that value was certain to attract large application numbers. It was also compelling enough to make applicants want to get through stage one – the registry.

4. IBM

The popularity of ad blockers tells us this – people are growing immune to advertisement. In this market scenario, how do you reach your target audience? How do make someone willing to consume your content?

At IBM, it is all about people. The focus isn’t on the corporate blog or Twitter id, but the people who make the company. IBM has over 17,000 internal blogs, and a 100,000 active bloggers running that community. People are more likely to listen to other people than they are to a faceless brand.

IBM trains its social champions. They call themselves IBMers, and they are given the tools necessary to build a powerful social media presence. Thousands of people identify themselves as IBMers on Twitter and LinkedIn. I was surprised to see that the company culture remains with employees even when they leave IBM.

The result?

Over $100 million in crowdfunding

Over 40% in gross profit revenues

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Invest in people. Employees, partners, well-wishers. There are over 40 studies to prove that they are more influential than official brand accounts on social media.

2) Use an employee advocacy platform to help your employees share your content on social. Build a powerful employee advocacy program that can achieve incredible reach and drive impact for your brand.

How to Be Profitable While Marketing on Social Media

So far, we have broken down profitable social media marketing strategies for insights. Now let us explore the basic framework that a social strategy requires to be profitable. Here five tips to help you implement a solid and returning social media marketing strategy.

1. Create awareness

2, Blog

3. Focus on the right platform

4. Collect and use audience data

5. Engage with your audience

1. Create awareness

Irrespective of your industry, brand awareness should be on your plan. Your target audience should be aware of the need for your product/service, what concerns of theirs it addresses and why they should choose your brand over others. Ensure that your business is known for something.

Begin by building a solid social media presence.

Organize your blog

Optimize your social media accounts

Participate in the relevant social media communities

Social media success depends on the value you create. You have to give away substantial value to succeed in a market where so much of it is already free. Do it HubSpot style, help potential clients achieve results by sharing free insights from your experience. Several companies see returns from their credibility and reputation on social media.

2. Blog

People seek help on the internet, and social media. It is no surprise that ‘How to’ is a heavily searched term. Your blog could be a powerful platform to field and answer queries that your target audience has. Like we discussed in the ShipServ case study, it is good to know exactly what they are asking first.

Share your expertise (make it unique)

Partner with bloggers and industry experts to create more value

Spend 20% of your time creating blog content, and 80% of it distributing it (on social, in email newsletters)

Your blog is an anchor to pull and hold your social media traffic. Ensure that the loop is complete though. Write blog posts that drive people to purchase your product/services. You don’t have to be promotional about it, you only have to show readers its use cases.

3. Focus on the right platform

Every platform you build a presence on is an investment of your time and money. Look at your budgeting as a mathematical equation. The variables (spends on each platform) on the left add up to the maximum budget that you have on the right.

Prioritize your platforms by their ROI

Accordingly allocate resources to your prioritized platforms

Track your progress and optimize your spends each month/quarter

Sometimes, the cost of work on a platform doesn’t justify what you earn out of it. In such a scenario, you could de-prioritize that platform and push something else up the priority list. Optimizing your effort and spends in this manner can help increase your overall social media ROI.

4. Collect and use audience data

Google Analytics has a module called ‘audience insights’. Based on visitor data, the module helps you understand more about who you are targeting and helps you identify the groups that you aren’t targeting yet. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also give you demographics and user interests so you can build an informed content strategy.

Pull audience insights from Google and social media platforms

Keep the insights in mind when creating your content marketing strategy

Tailor content on each social media platform based on its audience demographics

Your audience will make a move only when encouraged by exactly the right content. The more you know about them and the more you consciously use that information, the better your conversions are likely to be.

5. Engage with your audience

There are many ways in which you can engage your social media audience. While you should engage them on your platforms, you should also go beyond them to target your potential audience. They don’t have to be consumers, they can be partners or simply enthusiasts.

Target communities, forums, websites and blogs that are popular in your industry

Don’t sell before your audience is ready. Begin by being useful to them regardless

Engage with your target market and people who have access to them

Consistency is key in a community. You have to establish yourself as an expert and really become part of your community. Becoming a thought-leader us even more effective, but that requires staying ahead of trends and covering the evolution of your niche.

It is possible to generate ample revenue from your social media pages alone, but you require clarity in terms of your goals and plan of implementation. With the right tactics, partners and tools, you can surprise yourself with your social media results.

Image credit: Pixabay.com

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