5 Social Media Strategy Tips for Startups in 2018

We all know how difficult it can be for startups to get word out about their business, more importantly getting word out to the right people.
Thankfully in today’s advanced digital world we can skip the old school ways of expensive PR companies and use the wonderful world of Social Media. Yes that’s right believe it or not Social Media is just as effective, if not more effective than that fancy PR company you were going to hire.
New startups can find it quite stressful when first starting their social media campaign and may not even know where to begin, but that’s OK! There are several factors that need to be taken into consideration to ensure you have a successful social media campaign and get the most out of it. That’s why our very skilled experts have put together a list of tips to help get your new startup off the ground.

Have a Social Media Campaign in place

If you are new to the game it can be very overwhelming – figuring out where to begin can cause confusion.
Although social media is meant to make your life that little bit easier it can also make it worse if not used properly. Before you start anything ensure you have a plan in place, as with your startup you had a plan in place before anything else was done.

One of the first things you need to do which is a must, is determine who your ideal customer is – Who are you trying to attract and why? Try to be as specific as possible rather than vague.
There his a huge difference between saying “The ideal customer is Women” as apposed to “The ideal customer is women, not married between the ages of 18-30 yrs old, a homeowner, likes to travel a lot and lives in London”. It’s very important to get specific with your target demographic.If you don’t drill down to exactly who you are aiming your startup at it can be the be all and end all to you social media marketing campaign. There’s no point starting a social media campaign if you don’t understand who your audience is. Here is a list of criteria you should be asking yourself to ensure you are reaching the right target demographic:
1. Age
2. Gender Specific
3. Location
4. Interests
5. Marital Status
6. Lifestyle Circumstances
These are general questions to get you started, however, deepending on your business startup there may be additional questions you may wish to ask to determine your target demographic.
Once you have found your target demographic the next big phase is to work out which social media platforms you are going to use in your marketing strategy. Before you start joining every social media platform be sure to do your research as you only want to be using the social media platforms that your target market is using. There is no point using Pinterest if your target audience hardly engages with it.
As a startup business you have limited resources and you don’t want to waste your time, energy and money on something that is unprofitable. Once you have your target demographic and social media platforms sorted you have successfully got your social media campaign in place and are ready to go onto the next steps.
Creating Content

Content Marketing is very essential to your social media marketing strategy and should not be taken lightly. This is probably one the most important things to your campaign and if done correctly has a wealth of benefits to you.
There are various different types of content marketing that you can incorporate into your campaign structure, especially with all the new features and tools being created at such a high rate.Creating content is a great marketing tool that involves, but is not limited to, video marketing, sharing images, advice, and blogging.
The aim of content is to engage with your audience on a relatable level by providing them with valuable information that they are interested in. The more valuable the information the more likely your target audience is to trust you and want to know more information.
Depending on whether your startup is a B2B or B2C company will entail what type of content you should be curating. For more detailed information on Content marketing and B2B/B2C Companies click here.
Hashtags

Whether you use social media or not you must of seen hashtags almost everywhere and if you haven’t we don’t know where you have been hiding.
Initially Hash-tagging was solely used on Twitter, but as the years have evolved so has social media and every social media platform is now using Hashtags which mean you also need to be using Hashtags. Hashtags are a great tool, they help you reach a wider audience outside of your following range. This makes it much easier for you to engage with people that are interested in what you have to say, as these are the people you want to reach.However, it is not as simple as just hash-tagging anything and everything, serious research into what is trending and related to you needs to be done. Once you have researched the trending tags make note of them to use in your social media content, be sure to keep up with researching trending tags as these can change on a day to day basis and you don’t want to be still hash-tagging content that is 6 months old.
There are several tools available to help you identify key Hashtags and the popularity of them, our experts favourite tool for this is Hashtagify. This is a great tool that highlights top trending Hashtags along with related hashtags. It’s an impressive tool to help you get started in your marketing strategy.
An example other than trending tags to use are keyword specific content on your website, this is a great way to get people to see what you are all about. Once you have your list of Hashtags get posting, utilise the hashtags with your content and start building your fan base.
Social Media Planner

Social Media Marketing campaigns can be very time consuming for established businesses let alone startups. Having multiple social media platforms and having to post on a daily basis is a very long and tedious job, although very worth the hassle.
Because of this, our experts are going to share a great planning tip with you.
There are various social media planning tools that are great to use which free up a lot of your time but still gives you the same output. One of the social media planners that our experts love is Hootsuite, which allows you to add multiple social media platforms and allows you to post weeks in advance. You can find more information about social media planning tools here.Although social media planning tools like Hootsuite are a huge ease in your social media marketing campaign, it is essential that you still keep up-to-date on your social media platforms for new trends and news that is occurring on a day to day basis. If you have scheduled 3 weeks worth of posts and don’t check in again until your due another post you may miss a really big bit of news or new trend that is essential to your startup.
Determine ROI and success metrics

When starting your social media campaign is it a good idea to keep ROI in your pipeline. Tracking ROI is very different to each business strategy depending on thir desired outcome very often we find that startup business don’t track ROI from their social media effects.So why do startups struggle with this? The main reason is they don’t know how to or that they could. As a startup you need to remember what your goal is from social media marketing, ultimately it always boils down to ROI. It is important to remember that you can have a great social media campaign, but that does not always lead to ROI straight away it can sometimes take a little while to take effect. That’s not to say that it won’t happen straight away.
Our social media experts advise that you use Google Analytics to track website traffic. In their expert opinion it is one of the most simplest and easiest ways to track website traffic.
It has an immense amount of monitoring tools available for you to utilise to help build a complete picture of how your site is doing. Some of these tools include monitoring your conversion leads, evaluating performance of your content, monitoring where traffic is coming from and many more. For those that are unfamiliar with Google Analytics there’s no need to worry, Google offer a free course to those wanting to learn more about this tool giving them a better insight. Who better to learn form other than the Google experts.