Table of Contents
Social media for startups is a great tool, which helps to push forward the marketing campaign. Without it, most companies would have turned to a more traditional and conservative side of marketing. But thanks to the giant technological breakthroughs, now we have all of the famous social platforms used for communication purposes and for advertising a product or a service.
Did you know that just at the beginning of this year, lots of entrepreneurs were putting up various advertisements and engaging content on TikTok? Even though this platform was initially created for youngsters and social influencers. This is a prime example of how user traffic can significantly change, depending on your target audience.
This particular case raises excellent questions, such as: “What are the other social media channels for startups you can use to gain more marketing advantage?” and “What kind of social platforms can assist me in my startup journey?”. Here we would like to present a list of the most recent and active social platforms and channels to help you with your startup.
Importance of Social Media Marketing for startups
Let’s say it out loud: “Thank you, social media, for existing and making our business life easier, compared to just 15 years ago”. Just think about it: all of the enormous corporations had to put their ads on TV or radio, and they will be run at a specific timing of the day. Of course, during that time, these tricks were working, attracting customers to buy more Coca-Cola and popcorn. It still works, but only for B2C in the fast-moving consumer goods companies and consumer electronics mostly.
So what are the essential core points of social media for startups in the current time? Here are four key points.
Customers Feedback
Social media dedicated to the startups’ development process, is a great place to receive your community feedback or to attract a potential one! Most people will give you either a positive with notes of what they liked or can get a negative one too. But take both of them seriously and actively respond to your followers, asking their detailed opinion. Every user interaction matters since a few ignored comments on your “Google Play” app page may affect your branding image and can even go viral. So listen to your audience’s feedback, grow your startup, and identify the problems that the community considers an issue. However, don’t judge them too quickly. Otherwise, you are risking losing the whole business.
The testing ground for your ideas
Another relevant and yet sufficient benefit you can gain from your audience is sharing your alpha or beta app version to test your implemented solution. While testing your app’s functionality in your startup’s headquarters is an excellent idea, what’s even better is to let the public do the same thing! Apart from various bugs that they will find and the personal impressions that they will talk about, you can measure their patterns of interaction and engagement methods. Exactly that will push you closer towards understanding your audience’s desires.
Market Research
Every single analytical data that you can collect from your social platform is recommended to be researched. It is an excellent reason to check up on this data at least once or two times a week: this action will improve your traffic ranking among your competitor websites, and you will understand better how to improve your current feed. Don’t limit yourself to social, or blog pages ranking only; check your audience’s activity, traffic sources, content strategies, demographics, the peak of user activity, response timing, and even more.
Branding
The broad awareness of the startup idea from various social media sources is a good strategy to get more popular in the initial phases. Especially for those who don’t have any capital and require to build up their brand image. That’s where they start to create custom business pages on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To spread their piece of mind and reach the desired customer base. If their idea is truly unique and has never been seen before, they have a chance to go viral on the Internet.
It is true that you can use any social media for a startup’s brand awareness. However, you need to spend quite a lot of time and effort to actually understand the correct ways of accomplishing it. And you won’t have any idea neither when nor how your project will get the attention it truly deserves. If you want to test your landing or a sketch of your product in a local experiment to get noticed immediately, go ahead and see how Design and Discovery Phase can assist you with that!
For now, let’s dive into this topic a bit more deeply. To understand what platforms are dedicated to your marketing and others for growing purposes.
Social Media for Startups
There is no doubt that everyone knows the popular social media for startups and uses them every day. That’s why, in this section, we would like to highlight the key networks that every entrepreneur should have in their pocket for understanding and growing a startup correctly. On the other hand, we will also cover the most popular ones, but highlight the points on where and how you use a media channel beneficially.
Business Growth
Angellist
Angellist is an incredible network specially created for startups. Its goal is straightforward: connect a startup and an angel investor! One of the exciting sides of Angellist is its acceptance rate for companies.
As many various startups are continually rising, Angellist carefully checks and monitors the permissions to use their web platform. Once accepted, it will suggest a list of potential investors for your local area. If you want, you can also search manually. Otherwise, you can post some jobs if you are looking for some team members.
ResearchGate
The platform is launched by researchers and scientists, whose primary goal is to make the information and research process open for everyone. Similar to Angellist, ResearchGate also has a strict policy on user acceptance. But overall, this is an excellent platform to get your hands-on research and information about any scientific topic around the whole world.
Entrepreneur
Entrepreneur.com is a pretty comprehensive platform and even can be compared to perhaps one of the biggest publishing USA agencies. It aims to share and make a difference through the voices of professional and successful entrepreneurs’ ideas and opinions. During the last four decades, “Entrepreneur” was and is still standing on a pedestal as the top provider of valuable and premium content for young startups and small businesses worldwide.
StartupNation
StartupNation was initially founded in 2002 and was one of the first platforms that provided inspirational and innovative content for startups. Additionally, they shared lots of network connections, which everyone could add to grow their network and business. Entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs carefully craft the platform itself.
CoFounder
CoFounder is a network for all startup-like minds, where ideas, entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, investors, and executives all come together! The primary goal of this network is to start a new web venture and find your startup members. As the platform is considered under the private network, you won’t view members’ profiles unless you are already registered.
The Startup Network
Since 2008, The Startup Network has defined itself as a quality and effective platform that spreads its insights into startup communities. As they continuously encourage various organizations to collaborate and cooperate with multiple startup communities. How do they do it? Through valuable and original content divided into two groups: business events and research materials.
Marketing
Leisure and pleasure are two adverbs that you can describe on Facebook. A platform for easy and straightforward connections, where you can share your idea, freely interact with your audience, chat with your followers, and maybe demonstrate your business’s insights to warm up your community. As you already understood, Facebook is the right place for entertaining, intimidating, and communicating with your potential customers.
Some facts that you might find useful:
- 41% of USA small businesses frequently use Facebook
- More than 1.09 billion people log onto Facebook daily
- Facebook users are 54.7% female and 45.3%, male
Almost every startup out there has a Twitter profile, and with another 300 million active users every single day, pretty much every single person knows it. It is an excellent place for sharing your new content publications, collaborating with other professionals or institutions, and just spreading the word about your unique idea.
Here are some general statistics you might want to know:
- The primary audience consists of 25 to 34-year-olds adults.
- 63% of users primarily use their phones for Twitter.
- 61% of users follow small businesses, interact with them, and share their feedback.
With over 450 million active users, this is the most prominent place of all businesses and companies, which is LinkedIn. It is a platform designed to make a network of connections, get acquainted with other specialists, find startup mentors, advertise your feed, and has lots of different business uses. It can also be used to find perfect candidates for your startup or establish credibility in your industry.
Did you know?
- More than 40 million students and graduates registered on LinkedIn.
- More than at a rate of 2 users, various experts are signing up.
- 45% of all LinkedIn members are in their upper management positions.
Instagram is your shop window, where you can easily display and even demonstrate all of the right sides of your product. A visual demonstration for any given business product will speak better than any words.
It is also a good platform for your startup to let your audience feel and almost touch your creation. This is also an excellent method to build up a momentum of trust for your business and make up the right brand image.
Here are some of the basic stats that might be important for your business:
- Facial pictures get 38% more attention rather than any other ones.
- Mostly used by females.
- Considered the most essential network by the majority of American teenagers.
Similar to Instagram, Pinterest is also a good platform for showing off your product or services you provide in a visual appearance. However, what makes it different is that the amount of traffic you can get from Pinterest is much higher, rather than Instagram.
If you want a full-fledged guide on how exactly you can do that, let us know in the comments! Another good point is that this platform is ultimately the best place for startups whose focus is on running a chain of restaurants, art installations, E-Commerce, and clothing shops. Exactly these business fields are trendy on Pinterest.
To add up, here are some statistics that are worth mentioning:
- As with Instagram, 80% of Pinterest’s users share and create various pins.
- Up to 40% of E-commerce traffic is coming directly from this platform, compared to others.
- Almost 89% of all users have purchased a displayed product they pinned.
YouTube
YouTube is pretty much the best for anything. But the most useful function for startups is that you can simply broadcast your service or product to others online. It’s a good addition to your brand awareness.
On the other hand, you can use this platform to teach your audience some tips and tricks from the business you are working in or just let them see how your startup journey unfolds.
Additionally, it is the ultimate place for searching for a social influencer. With him, you can boost your product’s advertisement pretty drastically. You can also find an influencer via Instagram. However, the majority of the traffic will come from YouTube channels. Since most of the adults spend their time watching their favorite videos here.
Here are two facts worth taking a look at:
- Rather than any TV Show, YouTube reaches more adults from 18 to 34.
- Second largest media channel on the Internet.
A platform to raise your business
It is ultimately true that social communities for startups are great when it comes to uprising startups. Especially when you want to see whether your brand image and small product idea is worth the job. However, it is not the only thing you should be concerned about. In most cases, it is the search for the right investor. While in others, it is the construction of the business processes.
As a former startup group, we know how challenging it is to properly understand and identify all of your business field’s little details. And success may seem far away from the point where you are currently standing at. The failure counter just keeps on ticking further and further.
But don’t worry, as we had countless failures, we passed this stage and are ready to present a platform for your startup to launch successfully. Meet Design and Discovery phase, a unique program that JetRuby has polished and structured for your entrepreneurs’ needs. During it, not only you’ll understand how exactly you should test your hypothesis and identify your potential customers, but you also get a vision of your future product plan. Visit us here and let us know what you think!
Conclusion
All in all, social media is a unique channel created for multiple purposes. It can be used for different purposes, and the implementation methods vary from the goal you are following. Therefore, understanding what you want to achieve and how it will work is essential for any business.
So, make sure you’ve got at least core things for an active startup: business and finance plan, budget, dev team, business model, and proper market research. There are more things to come once your startup moves forward. So don’t forget to keep in mind what your startup needs and how you can help it.
Stay tuned for more exciting articles to come. Don’t forget to check out the Design and Discovery Phase that we prepared for you during this warm New Year!
