A Step by Step Social Media [Strategy] for Startups

social media strategy for startups
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Every single startup is thriving to get viral on social media. But most of them do not know where to start with. Social media marketing and management have become a game-changer for some startups but at the same time, some startups are struggling like anything.

Keeping the scenario in mind I decided to write a step by step method that startups can use to leverage social media by generating positive ROI from it.

Step 1 : Create a Customer Persona

By saying customer persona here I want you to create an avatar of your audience.

social media strategy for startups

As you can see I have created my customer avatar here. I want you to create your avatar before proceeding to step two.

Step 2: Reserving Social Media Handles

Now that you already know who is your customer persona, find out on which platform they are spending their most of the time. For me it was YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook but now Instagram as well.

It’s the time to grab some attractive handles.

Make sure you have similar social handles all over the social media channels.

Here are few tips to stand out and shine.

social media strategy for startups
copyright 2020 satrujitmishra.com

Use the above tips to get started. Make sure you keep it short simple and easy to remember. Do not hesitate to add real, the or official if the name is not available.

Now that you have your customer persona and handles ready, plan for a proper professional branding.

Step 3: Social Media Branding Assets

A consistency in branding is something that grabs the attention of your audience. Make sure you do some research about color psychology before finalizing your color pallets.

social media strategy for startups, brand color psychology
Credits- Oberlo

Here is an awesome color guide that you can use to define the best colors for your social media pages.

Once you are done with the color make sure you have consistent branding everywhere in social media. This means you cant share orange color posts all the time on Instagram and share black on Facebook.

Keep the same combination everywhere.

I do have some tips that might be helpful for your brand.

social media strategy for startups

Get yourself a social media kit, a logo, few fonts, 3-4 color pallet numbers and use them each time you create a social media post or blog header or YouTube Thumbnail.

If you have no idea how to get a social media kit, you can find it on many freelancing websites where freelancers are selling short gigs or you can send me an email.

No that you own a proper branding kit for social media it’s time to develop a strategy and start killing it on every social media platform.

Step 4 The Strategy:

What not to do

  • Same post everywhere
  • Same posting time everywhere
  • Same strategy everywhere
  • Same hashtags everywhere
  • Same approach everywhere
  • Being salesy
  • Being pitchy
  • Always talking about your business

Each and every social platform is different than the other you can win the game if you use the similar strategy for every single platform.

YouTube is a search based video platform, Instagram is a image based social platform, LinkedIn is more of a b2b platform and Facebook is giving more importance to video content.

If you think that a square graphic post about your product and services will do the work, you are never going to be successful.

To solve this issue I have created a new strategy that I call Constant Content Recycling Strategy.

  1. Find out the biggest problems in your niche
  2. Create a long-form of content (Video or article)
  3. Publish it on blog and YouTube ( you can publish on IGTV, FB, LinkedIn)
  4. Now start recycling
  5. Use best insights of the long format to create shorter version contents
  6. Create Info-graphics
  7. Create square graphic posts
  8. Use best insights in stories
  9. Cut large videos into small clips and post in stories
  10. Repeat everything


If you follow the above recycling strategy I can assure you sustainable growth with lowest time spent on creating content.

Now you must be thinking how do I find content ideas?

Here is a list of tools I use to find content ideas and keywords.

  1. SEMRUSH for Keyword Ideas
  2. TubeBuddy for YouTube SEO
  3. ContentStudio for trending topic discovery

You can use any set of tools you like.

Step 5 Content Creation :

In this step we will combine all the previous steps from brand asset to strategy and make stunning content that will make your audience go wow!

Before starting the creation part let’s take a look at some starts

  1. 77 Million posts are published each month using WordPress
  2. 500 hours of video content are published on YouTube each minute.
  3. 500 Million profiles use Instagram Stories Everyday

Those are crazy numbers aren’t they? Now the question is how do we stand out from the crowd?

We have to be very consistent and provide true value inside our content.

Here are few tips for content creation:

  • Provide Value
  • Be consistent
  • Use brand assets
  • Use right dimensions
  • Do not pitch on every post
  • Share 80% helpful and 20% business content

Now that you know what type of content to make let’s learn how do we make them.

Normally I use 2 content designing tools for images

  1. Canva (Freemium)
  2. Crello (Freemium)

You can use anything you like.

But my graphic designer uses Adobe Illustrator.

Make sure all your designs are in preferred size given by the social media channels.

social media strategy for startups
Crelo

The tools I mentioned above already have the sizes templates ready to go.

All you have to do is select one and start designing. You can choose existing templates or you can create from scratch.

social media strategy for startups

As you can see in the screen shot I used Canva to create this 1080×1080 image that is compatible with Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

To be honest I have zero design knowledge.

Because I am a marketer, I do not want to spend lot of time on Adobe tools ,because they seem complicated to me.

Step 6 Content Promotion:

So you are pumped up and created a lot of content and you are expecting massive engagement, traffic and followers.

It’s good to think positive but in this case, it is wishful thinking. Because organic reach on social media platforms like Facebook is almost dead. They are businesses with 1000s of staff. They need money to keep moving. And the 90% revenue of social media companies comes from paid ads.

If you think sharing content is equal to getting reach and engagement then you are wrong.

You have to promote your content either using organic ways or paid ways.

Organic Ways:

  1. Using hashtag
  2. Using Quora
  3. SEO
  4. Sharing in groups

Paid Ways:

  1. Engagement campaigns
  2. Influencer Marketing
  3. Collaboration
  4. E-mail marketing
  5. Paid Shoutouts

Step 7 Content Analysis And Scaling:

Last but not the list you must measure the content you share. There are a lot of tools in the market to measure social media analytics. You can use any tool you like. I use ZOOMSPHERE, it helps me to find out my working hashtags, best time to post, best days to post and best platform to post.

Once you find out the best days, best times, best platforms that are working for your brand, put double effort on them, and do not skip the other ones. Because a small algorithm change can give you a huge advantage. And people who follow you on Instagram might also go and search you on Twitter. So be present and active everywhere.

At the end, do not forget to measure your ROI from social media.

Conclusion:

Social media marketing is no doubt an optional marketing channel for startps, and it is not too easy at it seems.

But if you follow the right strategy from the start to the end like I have mentioned above (Step by Step) you can surely get your desired ROI from social media.

So that was everything I know and implement on my social media as a startup entrepreneur.

Now tell me which strategy are you going to implement?

Let’s discuss in comments!

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