Module 7 - Sharing your story
3. Social media
Social media is a train you don’t want to miss. Globally, over three billion people use social media at least once a month. The social media management platform Hootsuite surveyed over 9,000 B2B and B2C organizations of varying sizes across the world for their Social Media Barometer Report 2018 and found that 90% of brands use social media to increase brand awareness. Being part of the remaining 10% is anything but advisable.
You don’t have to be in every single platform that exists but choosing the best possible platform(s) for your business and putting in the effort will help your startup succeed.
- The most popular social media platform in the world with 2.17 billion users.
- Main audience is slightly older than Instagram and Snapchat.
- A Facebook page is essential for any startup business.
- Can be a great way to build a strong and active community. To do this, start conversations by asking questions and responding to answers as opposed to just posting a photo or news about your company. Having posts that invite interaction is important as Facebook’s algorithm means your post won’t show up on people’s feed if there are no responses or likes.
- Advertising options?Photos, videos, stories, messenger, carousels, slideshows, collections and playables.
- Cost? They vary depending on what you’re after. If charged for impressions (meaning someone has simply seen your post), minimum daily budget is around €1. If charged for clicks, likes, video views or post engagement, the minimum daily budget is around €4. If charged for low frequency events such as offer claims or app installs, minimum daily budget is approximately€35.
- More than 1.5 billion monthly active users, with approximately 45% of users accessing the platform daily.
- One of the most popular platforms amongst seniors.
- 70% of users have used the platform to solve a problem and 86% use it to learn new things.
- Great for creating e.g. ‘How to’ tutorials.
- Advertising options? Skippable video a.k.a TrueView ads (two formats: In-Stream ads and Discovery ads), non-skippable video ads, bumper ads, overlay ads, display ads and sponsored cards (find out more here).
- Costs? Depend on your daily budget. You can also choose to pay only when someone chooses to watch your TrueView ad for at least 30 seconds or engages with your ad.
- 1 billion active users
- A must for companies targeting millennials.
- Approximately 60% of users access the platform daily.
- 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business on Instagram.
- Heavily focused on images and visually pleasing content so a great platform for many food and drink companies.
- Great opportunity to show off your product/service in a creative way and create a recognizable visual image for your brand. Sharing user generated content (UGC) that is in line with your style is also a great way to connect with your audience and make your brand feel more authentic.
- Advertising options? Photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, stories ads and collection ads.
- Costs? The average cost-per-click is around €0.70 but there are various factors that affect the pricing (e.g.: ads with popular target audiences, such as age groups 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44, cost more).
- More than 330 million monthly active users.
- Approximately 46% of users access the platform daily.
- One of the most active social media platforms.
- 74% of users use the platform to get at least some of their news.
- 93% of Twitter users following small-to-medium-size businesses (SMB) plan to purchase from a brand they follow.
- Twitter accounts report it being important for customer service.
- Tweets with video get six times as many retweets as tweets with photos.
- Great for curating and sculpting the sort of content you’d like people to associate with your
business identity. However, it’s important not to just push your own products and services,
rather use Twitter to build an image of you as a thought leader in your field. It’s also an
excellent channel to use for customer service since many people tweet about an issue or
question they have instead of contacting the company by phone or email. - Advertising options? Promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends. The first two will cost anything between 0.34€ and 3.40€ per engagement, while promoted trends cost over 170,000€ per day (figures from August 2018). The ROI for advertisements can be good if combined with an effective marketing strategy.
- More than 260 million monthly active users.
- Best platform for brands wanting to reach a professional audience.
- Great for building a reputation as the go-to authority for experts in your industry, which will also help you get leads and sales. Share and post news, insights and developments relating to your industry, in addition to simply posting things about your company. Comment and take part in conversations that are relevant to the industry you operate in. Especially useful for B2B businesses.
- Advertising options? Self-Service ads (sponsored content, LinkedIn text ads, sponsored InMail, video ads, LinkedIn display ads, dynamic ads) and LinkedIn Advertising Partner Solutions (each partner offers different tools such as ad technology, content creation and media buying)
- Costs? You can choose between Cost per click (CPC), Cost per impression (CPM) or Cost per
send, for Sponsored InMail ads (pay only for the messages received). For CPC and CPM, you can set a daily spend limit and a bid price.
- Approximately 186 million daily active users.
- The most important platform for teenagers.
- The average active daily users access the app over 25 times a day.
- More than 3.5 billion photo messages sent over Snapchat daily.
- Great for B2C startups targeting millennials. Relate to your audience by being casual, silly or funny.
- Advertising options? Snap ads, collection ads, story ads, sponsored lenses, sponsored
geofilters, on-demand geofilters. On-demand geofilters are the cheapest and simplest way to advertise in Snapchat, cost can be just shy of €4.5.
- Approximately 250 million monthly active users.
- Majority of users are female.
- 55% of Pinterest users actively use the platform for making purchases.
- Compared to Facebook, Pinterest drives 33% more referral traffic for shopping websites.
- Place for inspiration and visually appealing content.
- Good way to reach people when they’re making decisions and provide inspiration for their daily lives. According to Pinterest, 61% of users have found out about new brands through promoted pins, and one out of two have made a purchase after viewing a promoted pin. More relevant to B2C than B2B companies.
- Advertising options? Promoted pins, promoted video pins, one-tap pins, promoted add pins, cinematic pins.
- Costs? The minimum bid per click or engagement is €0.087, and the minimum CPM (cost per mile) for awareness campaigns is €1.75 for regular Pins or €5.24 for video
What is it all for? Have clear, measurable goals. Are you using social media to drive sales, reach new markets, increase brand awareness, customer support, or to teach people how to use your product/service? Who are you trying to reach? This will affect the choice of channel(s). Who is your average buyer? Which channels does (s)he use? Get clear on your goals and target audience to get an idea of which channels you should put your effort in.
You don’t have to be everywhere: when it comes to platforms, less is more. Don’t spread yourself too thin by setting up an account to every possible platform. Be realistic about your resources and choose the channels where your customers are most likely to be.
It’s not all about you: according to Social Media Today, just 20% of your posts should promote your brand and 80% should be other content. People don’t like to be sold to and no one likes a person or brand that only talks about themselves. Make sure you provide value with your posts and create content that entertains, inspires or educates your audience.
Listen and reply: as discussed above, if you want to be successful in social media, you can’t simply push your own content and then leave it at that. It’s called social media for a reason. Social media is a great opportunity to get close to your customers and build camaraderie. Make sure you take time to reply to each comment and question and show your audience that their engagement is appreciated.
Visuals, visuals, visuals: you could argue that ‘visuals, visuals, visuals’ is the new ‘location, location, location’. Consistent imagery will help you tell your brand’s story and leave a lasting impact. Social media management platform Buffer has reported that tweets with images are retweeted 150% more often than their text-only counterparts. Additionally, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images.
Get yourself a toolkit: do yourself a favour and make use of scheduling tools like Later, Buffer and Hootsuite. These tools will save you time and help to ensure your posts go live when your audience is online to see them, not when you happen to have time for posting.
Measure, refine, repeat: knowing your target is only part of the battle. Even a well-defined target provides little value unless you measure your efforts and know how well you’re hitting it. Free analytics tools such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, Pinterest Analytics and LinkedIn Analytics help you track how people reacted to specific posts so you can refine your strategy as you go on. In addition to free analytics tools, there are also many paid social media analytics tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer.