Social Media for Start-ups

Based on 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report | © Social Media Examiner

Since start-ups have a limited budget, they sometimes cannot create large-scale marketing campaigns. Entrepreneurs therefore choose to invest their efforts into online marketing.

At first glance, it seems that online marketing is free – there are no direct setup costs. For example, using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is free of charge even for commercial purposes. And this is also the case for various location-based services such as Foursquare, Google Maps and Yelp.

But using online marketing does come with a cost – you need time to develop the appropriate social media marketing approach. Start-ups cannot afford to dedicate a full-time resource to online marketing just yet. This responsibility is therefore often taken care of by Managing Directors or Entrepreneurs, in addition to all other hats they need to wear.

What can you achieve thanks to Social Media?

Based on 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report | © Social Media Examiner

Social media is wonderful, and not only to expand your network of customers. Here are some other ways you can use this channel:

• Meet potential new employees. Through your online presence, they can get a sense of your culture, the projects you work on and who works there. Specialized networks such as LinkedIn or Xing create opportunities for start-ups to reach individuals with specific skills and hire them easily too!
• Reach investors and journalists. It’s easy to connect directly with this audience to facilitate your work and develop powerful, virtual relationships.

Based on Social Trends | © BurdaForward

• Exchange ideas. Be it a comment on a partner’s content or reading an interesting opinion on a topic of interest, you share ideas, gain new points of view and learn while active on social media. Plus, you position yourself as a subject matter expert in your field.
• Analyze the client support and the consumer behavior. With social media, take all the information available to research what your customers like and adapt your product management accordingly.

With these ideas (and many more), you can use social media management to increase your sales. And often, for small and medium businesses, this channel becomes the main growth driver.

Online Marketing Challenges

Effective online marketing comes with its own set of challenges, which are mainly due to limited time and resources.

To set up profiles in social media is done easily (and for free) but then what? You need to consistently keep an eye on these accounts and promptly respond to questions, requests and messages. And it does happen that one forgets to reply to a message and therefore lose the possibility of a sale. (We are all human after all!)

The access to all these channels is useful, but to be effective, you should share content regularly and ideally, your own. But it doesn’t stop there! You need to also distribute your killer stories it to many channels to increase your chances of reaching your target audience. This naturally takes time and efforts. (See the trend?)

Most companies rarely only manage one product, one brand or one language. When you factor in the requirements for each of these items (for lack of a better word), it is difficult to manage everything under one online presence. In these cases, a social media management tool is of great help.

Based on Social Trends | © BurdaForward

Additionally, social media marketing also means to look at what your competitors are doing online and stay a step ahead. Observing competitors also helps businesses identify their strengths, position themselves differently and identify opportunities.

And the case is similar with business partners. To develop lasting relationships, you should stay abreast of their latest online activities and help them achieve their goals.

Finally, it is also recommended to monitor the success of your own online marketing activities to continuously learn and improve your results. Many tools exist to help you but these often overwhelm users with various statistics and complex processes.

Quickly and easily use Social Media Marketing with webZunder

The company twentyZen focuses on simplifying social media management for small- and medium-sized companies. The result is the social media dashboard webZunder, which aims to solve the everyday online communication challenge of entrepreneurs and business owners with its many helpful features.

webZunder is organized around presences, which consist of a combination of various profiles on social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Xing, etc. – which is ideal for your product, service, brand or language. Plus, you are able to easily manage multiple presences separately – be it your personal, business or association presence. Other features include:

• Bundling of all the incoming messages from various social media networks into one interface, saving you time and managing all requests from a central location;
• Access to the online activities of your competitors or business partners through one click;
• Integration of easy-to-use templates to help you automatically publish your content to the chosen social media channels; and,
• Measurement of the impact of your online activities with the three performance indicators.

The best part? Start-ups get webZunder FREE for the first year! 

Of course, everyone can test our social media dashboard FREE for 14 days too!