Another blog I wrote from TigerStartups. As a bootstrap company I want to share with you some of my social media marketing strategies. Please let me know what some of your strategies are!
From TigerStartups:
You are a startup. You are bootstrapping. Whatever money you have you need it for the critical things - like infrastructure, a developer and a designer, if you can’t design and code yourself. With very little money you can barely afford traditional marketing. Forget TV ads or even print and radio. Just too much. And Facebook and Google advertising? PLEASE! They are not cheap and for the buck you are spending, you’re not going to get the return. So what do you do?
You have no choice but to do free social media marketing. The only thing this will cost you, of course, is your own time; however, your time is not cheap. You could use the time to strategize, think of new ideas, meet investors, network, or code. So time is money and you need to do your free social media marketing fast and effectively.
I too have this dilemma. Being a bootstrap startup ourselves, I want to share with you some of the free social media marketing that I have done fairly effectively, in my opinion. Below are some of the social media marketing strategies that I have used.
LinkedIn
Getting your brand out on LinkedIn can be effective if you do it right. Marketing is all about brand awareness and besides the product you built, the biggest brand of all is YOU. That means you need to connect with as many people as possible. Now here is a warning, don’t needlessly spam people for connections. LinkedIn will penalize you! So be careful. This doesn't mean you only can connect with people you know well. You can try to connect with people you don’t know personally, but if you do this then you need to connect to them with an introductory message. That way the message will act as if you are saying hi to someone, plus it will disarm the recipient from thinking you are just a spammer and reporting it to LinkedIn. Eventually your goal is to connect with as many people as possible but the “magic” number if there is one is 500. That number will signify you have many people interested in you. And second, these 500 or so connections is one simple market right at your fingertips, all with a status update. And depending who you connect with, they may be even future investors one day.
The other important thing to do in LinkedIn is to join as many groups as possible. Now again, don’t just join any group. You only want to join groups that meet your product’s target market. For example, I am in groups that have many Asian American members. Why? Because that is our target market. I am also in groups that discuss about businesses, technology and startups. Again, because they are our target market.
Now once you join all your targeted groups, you want to participate. Participating means starting discussions, commenting on others or liking people’s discussions and comments. You do this again to promote your brand, which is you, which flows down to your product. The more people see your face, the more likely they will click on you. Now if you make the discussion really interesting, then they will really want to know who you are and what your product is about.
Facebook
I will be honest. I don't have many friends on Facebook. I have 147 as of today. I say that because it is not uncommon for people, mostly kids, to have over 1,000 friends. That said, we all know they are not all really friends. So I am old school in that I don’t befriend someone casually. However I am more open to befriending people now just because of the marketing potential that your friends in facebook can bring.
Besides having more people seeing your statuses, you have more walls you can comment on. That means it’s not just that one friend seeing your comment but potentially all of your friends’ friends seeing it. I’ve had days where I made a comment on a friend's wall and next thing I know I am getting over a dozen new hits. That’s pretty effective for one comment that took me at most a minute to think and write.
What about Facebook company pages? Yes, create one. But I will be honest here, Facebook company pages don’t get you much traction unless you already have traction. But you still need to have it for credibility. The easiest way to get people to like your page is to message all your friends asking them to like it. Yes, shameless begging is okay.
Twitter
A simple tweet can change the world. It’s true. Ask Anthony Weiner. Unlike Facebook statuses, which can only spread so far, a tweet could theoretically reach the whole twitter universe. Of course that will never happen to anyone less you but the point is if you have an interesting tweet, it could catch fire and be retweeted thousands of times over. But this example is very far and few between. Most likely your tweets will only get a few hits from your followers. So to expand your tweet impressions, you need to include hashtags # in your tweets. Make sure the hashtags fit the context of your tweet otherwise you will just piss people off. With the hashtag, your tweet now becomes a more searchable item and the audience that searched for your tweet is now a more targeted one.
Also follow as many people as possible. Now I know TigerStartups doesn’t have many followers but it’s because we are basically new to the twittersphere. And we are currently short on social marketing staff. But over time we hope to have thousands of followers. Most times people will follow you back, but be careful. Some people will follow you and then unfollow you the next day. So watch the follow to unfollow counts. There are many tools out there that can help you manage your followers.
YouTube
I know from other people’s experiences Youtube is a very effective way to draw people to your site. You’ve all heard of a Youtube video going viral, right? Now that is always easier said than done but having a Youtube video besides the potential network effect becomes another Google search item. And, as you know, videos are more interesting than text. TigerStartups plans to submit videos in the future but for now it is not within our scope.
Blogs
Blogs, blogs, blogs. There are literally tens of millions of blogs out there. That is a both a good and a bad thing. Good because there are plenty of blogs for you to reach out to, but bad because of all the noise, you may not know which one to target. So research is necessary. It will take you time but once you find the blogs that fit your target market, start participating by commenting in their blogs. If you have a really interesting comment, you could easily get many hits to your website. I had a case in one of my other startups where my website was getting as many as 60 hits just from one comment alone! Part of it was because the comment I made was humorous but also because the blog I commented on was heavily visited by people.
But the best way to reach your audience is to actually contribute as a blogger. This way you will have a wider audience and if this is something that interests you, you can become a resident expert for the blog. This will drive your reputation and as you know branding is all about reputation.
There are other ways to promote your brand on social media of course. But the above write up is what I have been doing. If you have more tidbits, please share it with us.
