Social media is a tough environment to excel in but not impossible. Learn the first steps to help you decide where to start and capture maximum business efficiency.

Is More Social Media Really Better?

Cultivating a brand identity and loyalty is difficult, especially for a startup or small business that doesn't have a large following.

Often, startups try to combat this by following a misguided fallacy: More is better.

They create a Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, and MySpace page for their business then post the same pictures and captions across all accounts.

This approach harms brand identity, integrity, and loyalty because it's unfocused, fails to account for your target audience, and ignores who engages on each platform.

We're going to teach you to do better.

Throughout this feature, we will break down how to focus your social media outreach at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, detailing why social media marketing is important, how to pick the right platforms, and reviewing a case study.

You're Not Exactly the Next Mr. Beast

Social media's greatest asset is also its greatest temptation: audience reach. Where do you go to learn about any business today? You go to Google, a website, and a social media account. If you want to market your startup, what do you create after you've built a website? A social media account.

These platforms have massive built-in audiences just waiting for the next Mr. Beast to entertain or educate them. That's not you. You're not a content creator running a startup; You're an entrepreneur advertising a product or service on a platform. Know the difference.

Granted, some content creators successfully transition to offering products. Mr. Beast leveraged his audience to create a snack-candy vertical called Feastables, but you're not them. You're a business owner first, and a content creator second. You need to focus your precious time and energy on penetrating one or two social media platforms first.

READ MORE: Before You Leap: Understanding the Role of PR in Your Entrepreneurial Journey

Prospective customers, clients, and partners should learn about your company's brand, mission, and vision by seeing it in action on social media with the tap of a finger. You can highlight deals, spotlight employees, showcase CSR initiatives, or create engaging educational content that showcases your expertise to the masses.

Social media lets you easily showcase everything your business is about; brand, mission, vision, values, business practices, and anything else you want to highlight. Yes, your startup should use social media—It's an invaluable tool, but one that comes with nuance that requires quick adaptation, data analytics, and a little bit of luck.

How do you decide which platform to use?

Don't Boil the Ocean

It's tempting to bring your brand to the widest possible audience, especially at the beginning of your journey.

On the surface, it makes sense. More eyeballs = more customers = more revenue. However, this quantity-over-quality mindset is counterproductive.

Lackluster or absent social media doesn't drive traffic to a website or convert visitors to customers. It drives traffic to your competitors and/or damages your brand identity.

READ MORE: Four Tips to Generate Media Attention for Your Small Business

A steady stream of quality posts, graphics, captions, bios, etc. show competency, a commitment to excellence, and credibility.

A bombardment of poor content or no content shows you are incapable of managing simple tasks. If your business can't manage to post to social media regularly, how can a client rely on you to manage their project, or a customer to trust your product?

Rather than diluting your brand, build it around your target audience. Pick one or two social media platforms that cater to them and focus your marketing efforts there.

Find the Right Business/Social Media Fit

To thrive on social media, you must be focused and work from actionable insights. Like product/market fit, you must identify the best business/social media fit.

Utilizing customer personas, determine what social media platform(s) you are most likely to connect with your niche market and begin by establishing a brand presence there.

READ MORE: Customer Personas: How to Determine Your Target Audience for Maximum Impact

Let's examine today's biggest social platforms and their key audience strengths for business uses.

Facebook: Globally, Facebook is the most used social media platform with 2.74B active users. Facebook grants by far the biggest reach to a global audience, which is the primary reason why it's so popular among corporations. Furthermore, the U.S. user base of the platform is heavily skewed toward an older demographic, the key audience to many companies.

X/Twitter: One key aspect of X that has remained since Elon Musk's purchase and rebrand, is that it's extremely efficient in featuring trending news and conversations, fast. A hotspot for up-to-date news and a bombardment of updates from regular people, influencers, and companies, X is also popular among businesses. Its large audience, like Facebook, is a key contributor to this, but so is its combination of light-hearted content and breaking news. The audience demographics vary as well.

Instagram: Instagram was once the go-to for reaching a young audience, but today that's no longer the case. Now over half of the platform users are between 18 and 34 years old. If that is who you're looking for, then Instagram could be your avenue of approach. Like its Meta counterpart, Instagram is also popular amongst businesses—none do it better than Gushers, however.

LinkedIn: The hub of professional conversation, LinkedIn is the premier platform to connect with other professionals. LinkedIn is a must for companies that operate with professional clients, i.e. a PR firm. LinkedIn is a unique platform however, as it operates in a gray area, simultaneously the ideal place for many businesses and not ideal for others like those that target a young audience (NERF, Hasbro, LEGO, etc).

TikTok: TikTok DOMINATES the social media consumption of American youth and for many, their screen time in general. Its endless-scrolling and tailored algorithm revolutionized the online space and has been adopted (copied!) by YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. TikTok requires companies to do a few things:

1. Appeal to a young audience

2. Be interesting and engaging immediately

3. Push content often

4. Be up to date with trends

It is a difficult platform for companies, but for those who can maneuver the treacherous waters, the benefits are immense. It's the high-risk, high-reward platform of the youth.

This is not an extensive list, just the largest and most commonly used by companies. YouTube, Snapchat, or others may still be right for you.

How many you choose to start with is entirely dependent on the target audiences you wish to reach and the communities you aim to build. For some companies, four or five social accounts are needed to best harness the power of social media. For others, like us, one is all you need.

So, let's review why we chose LinkedIn.

Case Study: Evocati PR

At Evocati PR we only use LinkedIn for social media marketing as our target audience, business professionals, congregate in communities on the platform.

We've been using the platform to market our company since 2018 and have grown our audience to nearly 500 followers. Over the past 12 months, our page content has garnered over 10,000 impressions with nearly 80 shares—a small but significant validation that our content resonates and focus is paying off.

READ MORE: 4 Steps to Level Up Your PR & Marketing as a Solopreneur or Startup 

We grew our following through several steps that you can implement today.

1. We established an editorial calendar in AirTable to draft, track, and approve content on a weekly cadence.

2. We used Jasper.AI and met quarterly to brainstorm content ideas that would resonate with our audience.

3. We repurposed content by publishing all posts to our blog, newsletter, and LinkedIn page to hit audiences at three different points of consumption.

How will we further capitalize on our audience growth in 2024? We plan to create a lead generation offering on the page so followers and LinkedIn users can let us know they're interested in our PR and marketing services.

You Got This

This is no easy task, but starting a business is no small endeavor either. If you can run a business, you can conquer the social media landscape.

Stick with it, refer back here whenever you need, and stay tuned to Squared Away for more tips on navigating social media and the communications realm as a whole.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your company grow its social media presence, contact us today to get started.

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