A Quick Guide to Social Media for Startups
Why is social media marketing important? What social platforms should you be prioritising? How can you consistently come up with the content ideas you’ll need to keep the platform updated? In this article, we’re going to be discussing lots of tips and ideas you can use to get started or to help improve your existing social media strategy.
Why is social media marketing important?
So, why is it even important for your business to have a presence on social media? After all, it requires a lot of time and effort to keep the channels updated and work on having consistent, unique content. Social media marketing is so important because it gives you an opportunity to build your brand image to such a large amount of people. You can do that through the branding you include in each communication through the platform. It’s also a great opportunity to build brand authority by consistently updating your feeds with high-quality, useful content that really answers your audience's questions.
What social platforms are right for you?
When you first start building a social presence, the temptation might be there to get set up on every platform, and whilst this could well be the best approach for your brand - it’s still worth having a think about how your team will successfully create the content needed to go across each platform. If you’re wanting to really focus all your efforts on just a few platforms, which ones are right for you?
Instagram is a great place for most business types, but has great features specifically for B2C businesses. For those in the ecommerce industry - Instagram has some really useful features like a ‘shop’ tab, the ability to tag your products in posts, and acts somewhat as a digital catalogue for your followers. It’s harder to focus on targeting other businesses on the platform, but for those businesses with a heavy B2C target audience it can work great.
Twitter has a huge range of businesses on the platform that range in industry but see a lot of success - everybody from Burger King to Semrush. It’s also a good platform since most tweets won’t need an accompanying graphic, so it can be an easier platform to keep updated without needing the additional processes necessary for design work too.
LinkedIn is a fantastic platform especially for B2B businesses. You can use LinkedIn to target other businesses using things like company size, job title or job seniority - giving you arguably the best targeting for reaching businesses out of any of the other platforms. More than this, those on LinkedIn are likely in a different mindset to those on the other social platforms. Where Instagram, Twitter and Meta might be purely social scrolling - LinkedIn is a community of people looking to network, problem-solve for their business or advertise their own services. So, it’s an ideal place for B2B companies to be joining the conversation.
Meta
Meta tends to be a staple platform for most businesses within their social media strategy. There’s a great mix of users on the platform across all demographics, and advertising on Facebook is made easier through the pretty complex ads platform. Facebook is also really good for local advertising, as you can reach lots of people living around a certain area or who are participating in local groups.
How can I come up with new ideas for my channel?
One of the biggest challenges marketers can face is that of consistently high-quality ideas. How can you successfully keep on producing content that your audience loves? One way is to review keyword search volumes using a tool like Semrush. Try to identify keywords relating to your business that are experiencing an upward trend, and use that as the basis for a new piece of content. That gives you a great idea of what people are looking for at the moment, and keeps you creating content that is up-to-date and in line with the trends in your industry. Other tools like Google Trends can be helpful for this too.
Another way to come up with more content is to choose a pillar topic, and create sub-topic articles relating to that. For example, a marketing company might choose the pillar topic of ‘SEO’ and then create lots of smaller pieces of content that relate to that like ‘how to conduct keyword research.’ Creating a brainstorm with your pillar topic in the middle can really help you to visualise just how many other subjects there are to write about that can relate to that. Then with your keyword research in hand as well as your relating subjects, you can go and create content that is then reformatted again and again to work across multiple platforms. For example a blog on your website could be made into a carousel post for Instagram, and then an infographic for LinkedIn.
Read here for 48 more social media post ideas to add to your content calendar today.
How should I design a social media post?
We live in a world of free design templates - which are super fast to personalise and produce and therefore are so tempting to keep your feeds updated. The danger of using template design that every business has access to is, well, just that. Your competitors also have access to the same design, and without even realising, you risk creating content that blends into the background and does nothing to help your brand stand out.
Professional graphic design helps take your content to the next level. For example, a fantastically written blog might be lost when advertised using a poorly design image post, but could attract more visitors when advertised using an infographic that lets the viewer know what key points they can look forward to learning about.
When building your social media strategy, bear in mind not just the amount of content that you’ll need, but what you want the content to say about your brand. If you’re using social media to build brand awareness, every piece of content should be reinforcing a strong visual identity - which is done through expert design.
Read here to learn more about how Design Cloud can help with your social media design.
In this article, we’ve discussed some really important initial decisions that every startup will need to make about how they’re going to build a strong social media strategy that actually works for them. We’ve seen how it’s important to not just decide what platform will work best for you, but also how you plan to deliver the content that each platform will require. We’ve also learnt why social media marketing is important, and how every business should really consider how they can make the absolute most out of these channels. For more on how to design social media posts, read this Design Cloud article.
