Social Media Marketing For Startups & Beyond – 3 Takeaways

Most of the participants were from startups and the questions centered around themes such as “How do we get started with social?”, “On which channel should be we allocate our time and resources?” and other related topics.

The interesting point is that these are not necessarily questions that are unique to startups. Though larger companies may have more headcount dedicated to social media, these are some of the same questions that we still continue to hear even from supposedly ‘experienced’ social media hands.

Coming back to the event, the three key points that the panel tried to deliver to the audience were:

1. Don’t create remote, dusty, unmanned outposts: Adam pointed out that while it is tempting to try and establish your brand presence on every new, shiny channel that crops up, if you don’t have the resources and the time to keeping your presence current on that channel, your brand will appear broken to those who visit you there. It is better to not have a presence than to appear as though no one from your company cares enough to keep the content updated.
2. Re-use content: Jason talked about how his team has created the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn. This is a guide that is over 50 pages long but they have repurposed and reused content from it to fuel their social media and demand generation efforts for an entire quarter. The key message is: don’t go overboard trying to create new content for every channel that you want to be present it. Reuse, repurpose and repost where and when possible
3. Align your social media objectives to your business goals: Being the “boring, old enterprise software guy”, I observed that while social media teams may revel in reaching “vanity metrics” related goals such as ‘n’ new followers, no one else in their company cares for these metrics. If they need to become relevant to their colleagues in other parts of the company, they need to ensure that their goals are aligned with the overarching goals of Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, HR etc. The actual alignment would vary by company but one example that almost always is relevant is tying social media investments to the impact on the Demand Generation process (i.e. how do your efforts on Social Media impact the number of qualified leads and time to revenue?)

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