Social Media is great for rapid fire conversations. It's more of a quick thought and fast comment medium — not really a long form narrative medium like the Web or newsletters. This makes it an ideal place for gathering feedback, whether it's a lightweight response in the form of a "like" or a more thoughtful long form comment.

What's also nice about social media is the ability to swiftly extend our reach beyond our immediate social circle. Well-crafted posts can be designed to be shared — which can quickly increase our exposure without costing us anything.

We're going to leverage social media as a blend of surveying and lightweight customer acquisition.

These efforts will go hand in hand so we're looking to get into a "two birds with one stone" situation. (That’s assuming you're OK with pelting birds with stones, which you probably shouldn't be…)

The challenge Founders (or any marketer for that matter) run into when trying to leverage social is by starting off in a self-centered way -

"Here's my stuff, look at me, focus on me, react to ME!"

Then they get disappointed when apparently no one gives a shit.

That's not because social didn't work. It's because they didn't use social the right way. Using a one-to-many approach where we just stand on a soapbox with a megaphone and talk nonstop doesn't interest anyone.

The only thing anyone cares about on social media is themselves, so we need to feed their ego — not ours.

A good social media approach involves looking for as many ways to engage other people (this takes work) as it does hoping people will engage us. A simple formula is to think of it like this - for every 1 “like” someone has for us, we have to find 2 likes for someone else. Does that sound like a ton of work? It is. But that's the rub with social media - we have to actually be social!

Our approach to social will start off fairly modest — with our own social networks — and then grow them a bit toward a network more specific to our new startup. To grow our network, we'll begin a regimen of consistently engaging our followers with questions and conversation topics as well as taking some time to respond to others so that we're not hogging all the attention.

We'll also be extra mindful to respond quickly whenever someone else reacts to our posts so that people know we are listening. We don't need a ton of followers just yet - we just need a small group of followers who are willing and able to engage with us on a regular basis. This is how we are going to build our initial superfans which form the basis for a much larger customer population as we grow.

Whether our startup is brand spankin’ new or if we’ve been around the block a few times — social media is a “must-have” for a successful online marketing strategy.

But, before we start creating social profiles for our startup, it’s a good idea to first create a new email account specifically for social. It doesn’t have to be fancy — just something simple like “social@ourstartupname.com”.

We’re going to get a ton of email from these sites — so, keeping things separate makes it’s easier to manage and filter from a separate email account.

From a team perspective, this will also keep things neat and organized if we decide to have more than one person publishing one of our social media profiles — or for when we hire on someone to take over our social media accounts.

Facebook is the “world’s largest social network” with over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide. Between the United States and Canada alone — there are nearly 200 million people that log into Facebook every day.

To put that in perspective, that’s 80 million MORE people than the 103 million viewers that tuned into the 2018 Super Bowl. The good news is you don’t need a budget of Super Bowl proportions to get into the Facebook game.
To get started, navigate to facebook.com/pages/create. You’ll then select what type of page you want to create. Then, you’ll fill out the required information and click on “Get Started”. After that, Facebook will walk you through the page creation process with easy-to-follow on-screen instructions.

To get your first followers, link your profile to your page and invite your friends and family to “like” your page.

People on Twitter are looking for what’s new — for great content and stories from the people, businesses, and brands that they’re interested in. Also, about 47% of people who follow a brand on Twitter are more likely to visit that company’s website.

To get started, head over to the Twitter homepage and click on the button that says “Sign Up Now.” Then, complete the signup information that is required.

To get your first followers — you can use the feature that they offer during signup to import your email addresses from your Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook email account, which will enable you to begin following some of your contacts — and hopefully they’ll follow you back!

A LinkedIn Company Page helps others connect and learn more about your business, products and services. But before you create a LinkedIn page for your business, you first need to have a LinkedIn profile with your real first and last name.

After you have your personal page made, Click the “Work” icon in the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage. You’ll then navigate over to “Create a Company Page”.
After entering your company name, you’ll need to choose a URL. Then, after verifying that you have the right to act on behalf of your company, you’ll click the “Create Page” button.

In addition to sharing interesting and relevant content, to get your first few users, you can invite and share your company page with your connections on your personal page.

Instagram is a place where visual expression from businesses inspires people around the globe to take action. In fact — 60% of people have said that they have discovered a new product via Instagram and 200 Million Instagrammers visit at least one Business Profile each day.

Creating an Instagram Business Account is fairly easy — after downloading the Instagram app for iOS from the App Store, Android from Google Play store, or Windows Phone from the Windows Phone Store — tap to open it.

You’ll then select “Sign Up” and enter the details required — or, you can log in with your Facebook account to sign up that way.

You’ll then want to create a free business profile to give people more information about your products, service or business. Visit “settings” and select “Switch to Business Account”. Once you’ve done this, you can then add any pertinent information — like your hours, business address, or phone number.

To get your first few users, begin posting content that you’d like to see on your own feed. Be sure to use relevant hashtags and follow accounts that are similar to yours.

Before we punch out a single character, we first want to figure out what our goals are, also known as our "Call to Action" (CTA). Our goals will typically be to query our audience with questions we have about our business or to drive them toward a particular action, like signing up for our newsletter.

By now the list of questions we have for our audience is probably getting pretty long. For example, we probably want to know what products people are currently using that might be similar to the one we have in mind.

Let’s say we were starting a competitor to high end fitness apparel brand Lululemon, and we wanted to know more about how buyers thought about their pricing, we might ask:

"Lulu wants $100+ for a pair of leggings - crazy! Ladies, what's the most you're willing to spend on your yoga gear?"

What's beautiful about a question like this is you're not making it feel like a survey. You're stoking the fire a bit by mentioning that you think their pricing is "crazy" but also asking for a simple response - a dollar value.

A "survey" like this will not only get us some early feedback on how much our audience is willing to spend (to set our pricing) but also how they emotionally react to a higher price point. Those emotional responses can become fuel for further posts, such as putting more of a spotlight on their overpriced yoga gear and later comparing it to our (much) better alternative!)

Some popular CTAs we might use:

We're not limited to these CTAs, so by all means we can stray a bit, so long as what we're posting has a very specific purpose or outcome.

Our ideal post is fairly short and focuses entirely toward our CTA objective. Do we want to survey our audience for some key data? Do we want to create an incentive to join our mailing list? Do we want to extend our reach by creating something worth sharing?

While our objectives may change from post to post, we're going to use the same guidelines for how to compose a solid post that will drive consistent outcomes:

1. Try To Ask Questions. If I say to you "This rain sucks." you might just nod since I didn't ask you for much more. But, if I ask you "How about this rain?" — you sense an expectation to give a response. Questions are the magic trick that turns statements into conversations. Composing our posts as questions allows us to lower the barrier to getting a response out of our audience because we've handed them the prompt.
2. Target Short Responses. Many people will engage with our content on a mobile device. As such, typing long-winded responses can become a chore. Instead of asking "Why is red your favorite color?" we'll ask, "Is red your favorite color?" Our first goal is to get any response — we can then follow-up with the respondents with expanded questions — which they are more likely to answer since we now have their attention.
3. Reference Your Audience. Wherever possible, let's cite one of our followers by name. The moment we tag someone else they get notified of our post but we also build a small bit of ownership in the post which we can use to prompt them to contribute.
4. Images Speak Louder Than Words. Same as with a newsletter, if you can say it with an image, use an image. A compelling image, whether it's a screenshot, a product photo, or even a funny meme will get far more attention than just about anything we can write with text.
5. Write It Like It's Shared. When composing a post, we want to picture how that post would look on someone else's feed when it's shared. For example, instead of posting "I love the color purple" consider posting "Purple color lovers of the world, please share your love with a fellow Purple lover!"

Anatomy of Great Social Post

• Image to start
• Compelling question
• Reference at least one follower
• CTA

In order to get the maximum mileage from each of our posts, we’ll want to share them across as many social networks as possible. The Big 4 are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram. Some may be more appropriate than others but the additional cost and effort to post across more networks is so small that it’s worth pushing everywhere all the time.

If you find that jumping across multiple networks is a pain, there are some tools like Hootsuite that will allow you to manage multiple networks simultaneously to ease some of the burden. You can also schedule your posts so that you can post a handful of them at once but have them appear over a set period of time automatically.

In the early days, we need to respond to every action — every like, every comment, every share — with even more energy. What we're doing is showing our audience that we're listening and that we're willing to engage if they are.

If we see 5 comments to a post on Facebook, we should do everything we can to respond to each of those comments. More importantly, we should look for any opportunity possible to extend the conversation. If someone replies to our post by saying "We dealt with the same issue!" our next reply should be "Can you tell us a little bit more about what you dealt with?"

Not only will we get more mileage out of our post, we may actually kickstart the momentum of the comments to garner a whole new conversation that generates even more shares and ultimately, customers.

Posting to our own social networks is rarely going to net us more than the customers we already have, although we're hoping to build a strong relationship with them. But we want to be far more popular than that, don't we?

Of course. To do that we're going to need to learn how to make friends online.

Recognizing that we may not have a ton of time to stay on top of this — after all, we're building a startup over here — we'll initially aim for 2-3 posts per week and at least a dozen responses, retweets, or, at the very least, a handful of "likes" on other people's content — especially those that are following us.

The split of days (Monday, Tuesday, etc) isn't critical. You can do most of your posts in just a couple days, but having a little bit of time dedicated toward checking your social accounts each day will put you in a better spot to respond quickly as comments and shares occur each day.

If everything goes to plan, we'll begin growing our audience while also starting to learn a lot about how potential customers think about our product. What's nice about this is we don't have to rely on building a huge audience right now — even 100 of the right people can teach us a lot.

We're also looking to add a few followers every week. We're not trying to "dominate Twitter" here. The goal is to build up a small but engaged audience that we can use as a jumping off point to build our social network later.

Keep in mind that the amount of work we'll put in here versus the results may feel a bit intimidating at first. We may put 5 posts out there without a single response. That's OK. It takes time to build an audience, and most social networks choose to favor content from creators who show more willingness to post frequently, so we're basically building up our reputation as a good creator along the way.

As our social network grows, so will the value of every one of our posts. So, let's think of these initial steps as a valuable learning exercise that may blossom into a very valuable customer tool later down the road.

Now that we’ve got all of our social media ducks in a row, we’re ready to survey our audience with outcome-driven questions that spark conversations and provide critical feedback that we can use to better understand and respond to our customers’ actual needs.

We’re also ready to harness social media to drive customers to take a specific action — whether that’s subscribing our newsletter, trialing our product, or encouraging them to share our post and increase our brand exposure.

As we learned, optimizing our social media efforts is all about being diligent about not just tending to our own existing networks, but about creating new relationships by following industry advocates and friends of friends, by sharing their content, and by getting in the habit of regularly leaving thoughtful comments on their posts.

So we know how to drive early customer acquisition without spending a dime. But what happens when we start actually throwing money behind our efforts? Will we see better results? Should we use Google Ads? Facebook Ads? Both? What’s the difference between them?

Let’s find out, shall we?