You’ve spent countless days and many a sleepless hour coding your brand new app to perfection – but have you given any thought to your social media? Maybe you think that it’s a bit of time waste or something that other larger companies have?
Social Media is becoming more and more of an integral part of your business plan, and when done right, can be an efficient and low-cost way to attract new customers and engage with an active community – but maybe the boss isn’t quite as convinced?
Here’s my Top 5 reasons why you need to ensure your start-up has a social media presence:
1. It’s where your customers are
It seems obvious, but it bears repeating. It’s why toy companies advertise when the Saturday morning cartoons are on and why beer and fast food companies advertise during the football. You should be where your customers are. You don’t have to be on every single social media platform out there, but with a little bit of research and customer knowledge, you’ll be able to pick a couple of social media networks worth spending time on.
2. It doesn’t have to cost the earth
Paid advertising can be a pretty costly experiment for new companies, but getting your social media presence established can be done for next to nothing. All the social media channels worth being on are free to join. I admit, it may take a little bit of time to get started up initially, but it should be much easier as time goes on.
3. Social Media humanises your company
It’s easy for us to forget that sometimes that there are people behind even the biggest brands. Social media allows us to talk a little more freely and openly with fans. It’s a good chance to drop all the marketing-jargon and talk openly and honestly with your community – if you do it right, they’ll love you for it, which will only help increase customer loyalty and heighten engagement, making them more likely to stick around.
4. It can help grow other parts of your business
You’ve set up a Twitter account and Facebook page for your company, but that doesn’t mean the job is done – think about other ways that you can use social media to help other teams. One example is Customer Support – many companies have quite successful customer support teams that operate purely with social media as their point-of-contact for their customers. Or maybe your sales team can leverage it? Or maybe your dev want to test out some ideas of what features your customers may want to see?
Making the customer feel like you can be contacted any time for help or feedback on a platform that they’re already using helps your business and your customers and we we know, happy customers are paying customers.
5. You can network with your industry peers
The best thing about establishing a social media plan is that you don’t have to do it alone. You’d be surprised the number of people involved with social media who are willing to help you with building a media plan, as well as giving you advice on your business in general. Take this post for example! Every company that you see on social media had to start somewhere, and a lot of teams are more than willing to help out – there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time.
Hopefully as your community grows, you’ll be able to employ someone else to look after this function (or even outsource it to some professionals), but just because you’re a cash-strapped start-up, it doesn’t mean you should miss out – there’s no reason why everyone can’t have their social media say!
Will facebook or twitter even work on that computer?
