brand, social-networkingI’m launching a new company and am about 1 month away from full launch. I recently joined the main social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Intagram, and a personal blog on my site) and will start posting regularly to grow a history.
I have a few ideas how to market to my target audience and hope that they will follow me, but I think it’s also important to simply gain followers in general even if they are not my target audience for 2 reasons - first I think people are more likely to follow someone if they already have a lot of followers, and second because it will improve my search results.
Are there any startup groups where people follow each other to help get an initial base? There are a lot of terrible articles on how to grow and for the most part its suggested to just start following a lot of people and hopefully they follow you back.
There are a few networks for startups Startup Nation, Meetup but I could nto find any where people agree to follow each other. I think this is something many startups would want and I am actually interested in seeing how other startups use social media so I can see what/how they post and which ones are successful.
Anyone know of a group like this, and if not, want to start one with me?
UPDATE
I think this is a very important step for new startups so I’m going to add what I’ve learned. Please add comments if you disagree with any of these findings.
Facebook - Grow user base through direct marketing to customers. Do not promote anything. Do not pay to get more followers. If the business is located locally and will not have any international targets, block access from many developing countries to prevent likes from unengaged followers.
Google+ - Google blocks automatic posts from other sources so many people use this as their base for posting messages. Use this to post directly to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and other sites of they apply.
Twitter - Growing user base is important. Find any and all relevant users that tweet a lot and follow them. Ask some to visit your site in hopes of having them follow you. User base count is important but undetermined if it’s worthwhile to pay for followers. Probably not worth much.
Pinterest - If you have images that you want customers to look at again which relates to selling your merchandise/branding, allow users to Pin images from your site to Pinterest. Have your own Pinterest page with all important images from your site in appropriate categories. This can be a burden to maintain so do not overdo it.
LinkedIn - Not just for a company page. Page must first start from employee which means the company page revolves around an individual first and that individual’s page matters more initially. Make sure you have joined several groups and have followers so that when you add your corporate page, others will see it and you can promote it.
Instagram - Main social media site for the younger crowd. Do not post images alone. Add text, #, and @ similar to twitter. May as well post same message to Twitter as Instagram. User base count here matters and people tend to have almost 2x as many followers here than on Twitter.
You write:
I think it’s also important to simply gain followers in general even if they are not my target audience for 2 reasons - first I think people are more likely to follow someone if they already have a lot of followers, and second because it will improve my search results.
It’s not necessarily true, and beware of doing this kind of stuff on Facebook. See these two videos:
http://www.mesoconcepts.com/2015/01/maintaining-an-active-presence-on-facebook-is-a-waste-of-money/
What they explain in a nutshell is that the more unengaged FB users you have, the worse off you are. FB doesn’t send your message to all of your users; it sends it to some. The number of Likes you get from the sample determines whether the message reaches more users. As such, the less engaged your users are as a group, the less you’ll be able to reach the users who want to engage with you.
Anyway, based on the above, my answers to:
Are there any startup groups where people follow each other to help get an initial base? Anyone know of a group like this, and if not, want to start one with me?
… would be that you should revisit the idea of doing any of this, at least for FB, because even if these groups exist participating in them may work against you.
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