Loading...
Answers
MenuWhat is the best social network for organic sharing?
Facebook now requires us to shell out money in order to get users to like our page, and they also require us to pay to reach these same users. This is insane. What's the best social network for startups? One that would allow minimal payment, and yet has the viral factor enough to compel us into fame?
Answers
I've loved Reddit.com from a viral / incoming traffic point of view, but you've got to be a broad contributor, ensuring that you post non-business content and interact on other's contributions. If you only self-promote, you'll quickly get banned from the "sub-reedits" you really want to post to.
It helps to make sure your customers and friends know when you post on reddit. Organic "up votes" can take your links from getting a few hundred hits to 10,000+.
Hope that helps!
Ken Clark
Coach, consultant, and therapist to entrepreneurs
That depends on your product and service.
For example if you are targeting professionals than LinkedIn is your way.
If it's youngsters than Twitter and FB.
Reddit and Quora can also be great source.
Twitter and LinkedIn can both be effective with good organic strategy, but I'd hardly say that guarantees you'll go viral or achieve fame. The largest reach is always going to be with good targeted paid posts. This all comes down to having a diversified content strategy. There's no free lunch. You are going to work hard and you will have to pay sometimes to leverage the hard free reach.
No easy answer. We have worked with hundreds of businesses on this front. Facebook is good and worth it if you target correctly. Twitter is excellent for reaching reporters and bloggers. Instagram is good for the fashion, lifestyle, artist, foodie audience. There are sooo many channels to choose from. Pinterest is excellent in terms of beautiful consumer packaged goods, fashion. Choose your channels and strategy according to how you are targeting. They are all valuable for their own reasons. Your owned content is the most the valuable and effective way to reach people. So that means writing excellent blog posts and publishing them on a consistent schedule -positioning yourself as the SME in your space. I agree about Reddit -it's insanely powerful but if you're not authentic and you're there to sell they will boot you out in a heartbeat. Vine, Snapchat, Reddit, Google+, YouTube, Feed, Thumb, Medium, Chirp, Learnist, RebelMouse, Yammer, Ning, Tumblr... and I could list hundreds more. There are thousands of tools and channels. Find the right one(s) for your company and create a strategy around those channels. Pitching your story to high profile blogs or websites from an editorial standpoint is also a good idea. PR alone or social networking alone won't result in being propelled to fame. 'Fame' comes when you have that magical cocktail of opportunity, timing, preparedness and you're offering something that truly sparks people's imaginations. Happy to hop on a call about any of this. Good luck!
It depends on the type of startup and the users its products are aimed at reaching. Twitter is best for influencing the influencers whereas Instagram would best target a younger audience. These days Facebook is, on the other hands, increasingly used by an older audience (35-55).
You can use Hootsuite and buffer to do the job for you as they are good for organic sharing.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
Related Questions
-
What should I do to have my first client on Clarity.fm?
I started on Clarity just by answering questions last summer. I used to love Quora but really disagreed with a number of changes they made and so when Clarity launched answers, I started answering questions. I'm incredibly busy but let's face it: we all have extra time. We spend it looking at our phones, on Facebook, socializing with friends, whatever way each person does it, we all spend time on non mission critical stuff. Because I genuinely enjoy helping others, I treated Quora as a way of relaxing the same way others would read news sites or blogs. And so I switched all that time to Clarity by answering questions. I don't recall the exact specifics but by providing real answers (not just, "call me, I can help you), I had my first call request within about a month of my first answer. And I got a nice review. And some more questions answered, and a couple more calls, and a couple more reviews. And from that point, the call volume increased. Simultaneously, I started referring all "can I pick your brain" requests on LinkedIn and email to my Clarity account. And so some calls initiated that way. More reviews. Now, a year later, I have done over 200 calls, with the majority of it inbound from Clarity. Take it from me, if you make the time, and provide genuine help to people, you will get rewarded for it. But like anything in life, if you're not willing to invest the time and resources, you're unlikely to see any return.TW
-
Which link shortener should we use in our social sharing strategy to track our Analytics?
I might suggest starting with Bitly and exploring the possibility of getting a custom branded shortener, which you can set up through Bitly once the domain is purchased. For example, my website is philpallen.com but I shorten all links to philp.al/link so it's more professional. I feel like many other shorteners look like spam, but I'd say your safe with Bitly because it's widely used. A custom one would be even better!PP
-
How did Snapchat boast a solid user base within a short period of time, compared to Facebook and Twitter?
I've been in the picture messaging space for a while now with my apps Lutebox (voted one of London's top ten most loved apps) and now Click Messenger. I've written a few articles about the space including a recent post about the Future of Mobile Messaging. Snapchat started out as an app called Picaboo, which pretty much did what it does now (prior to the latest update with chat and video calling). They quickly rebranded but saw a little uptake in user numbers and had quite low downloads for several months. Then around Christmas 2011 one of the founders' mom had told her friend about the app, who told her kid and her kid basically then spread the word throughout their high school in L.A. That was what really blew up their download numbers as it spread across teenagers at local high schools. As far as I know they didn't advertise in the early days, relied solely on word of mouth. Also it is assumed that they have a solid user base. Comparatively speaking, their user base may be in the low tens of millions, which may a great base of users, but nowhere even close to being as big as Facebook or Twitter. I'd be happy to speak about this in more detail or about the picture messaging landscape and what I believe to be the future of mobile messaging.AA
-
How does my startup hire an affordable marketing expert?
I don't even know how to answer this. Do you know what the difference between McDonalds and the local burger joint that is filing for bankruptcy is? It's marketing. McDonalds is worth billions of dollars not because of the quality of their food, but because of their marketing. Marketing is not an expense. A janitor is an expense. Your computer is an expense. Marketing is an INVESTMENT. Would you shop around for the cheapest heart surgeon? Of course not. Because you would likely end up dead. Why, then, do you shop around for a marketing expert? Are you ok with your company going bankrupt? Is that worth the small savings to you? No. Of course not. Hire someone who is good at marketing. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Buy yourself a Lamborghini with your profit the first quarter. Get a beach house in hawaii. Grab a yacht. Or, try to find your business the cheapest heart surgeon you can and then spend the next five years wondering why such a solid business idea failed in the first 6 months. I'm passionate about this exact topic because all those statistics you read about "70% of businesses failing in two years" are solely because of horrible marketing.AM
-
How do you build social media presence up before a product launch?
It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!SB
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.