Many entrepreneurs, when starting out, account for hours of grueling work spent budgeting, slideshow-ing, pitching, and more. However, many tend to miss out on an equally important logistical component of entrepreneurship: social media.
During one of the Ideation Lab’s workshops, the wonderful Faria Jafri came in to give ICUBE’s entrepreneurs a bit of advice on how to set up and grow their social media platforms. Her workshop was engaging and refreshingly insightful, so we at ICUBE thought that many more deserved to hear it. Read on to learn all about social media management as a startup founder.
First off, Jafri warns us that social media is not a magic pill. Nowadays, due to the sheer volume of people and businesses on social media, it can be difficult to garner a significant amount of attention or, more importantly, to get conversions. What are conversions? As a business, it’s important that your social media followers are not just followers, but also customers. When your followers interact with your business, this is called a conversion. In this way, social media can serve a dual purpose: it can be a branding play, and it can be a support for your sales strategy.
It is very important that you are intentional and thoughtful with everything you do on social media. If you are B2B, you want to show that you are knowledgeable and understand the problem you are trying to solve. If you are B2C, establish trust through social media by showing behind the scenes and lots of testimonials. Remember that there is a lot of noise on social media – it can be very easy to get distracted. This is why you want to answer the following questions before you do any posting:
- What do you want to achieve from your content?
It’s important that all of your content is created with intention. An easy way to ensure you’re doing this is to create a content bank before you start posting, which will be discussed further below.
- What do you want your audience to do? How will you measure the success of your content?
You want to get conversions, but how you do this may be unique to your business. The goal could be to get views, likes, comments, or some other action that you let people know about through your Call to Action.
- Where is the customer looking for the answers to the problem you’re solving? What mind are they in when they’re on that platform?
Some of the most common social media platforms for businesses are Pinterest, Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook. Your customers could prefer video or text, and they could prefer serious content or more comedic content.
After you’ve thought about your approach to social media, you’ll need to come up with content to post. Jafri suggests that entrepreneurs create a content bank in advance; that is, she suggests that you set up an Excel Sheet or Trello that contains all the posts you plan to put out, along with some key information about them (like the date you post it and analytic info). In order to come up with ideas for your content bank, you can do the following:
- Search for questions that your audience might want answered through Google. Look up a topic relevant to your business or a question you think your audience would want answered, and scroll to the “People also ask” section. Make content that answers these questions.
- Look at competitors. Figure out what they’re missing, or improve upon their content.
- Show the process by filming behind the scenes or creation videos, day in the life videos, packaging videos, etc
- Quick wins: give a tip that audience can quickly and easily implement in their lives to see your value, or show a use of your product or a way to use your product that’s not common
- User Generated Content: stitch other people’s content or respond to comments with posts
- Do “Ask me anythings”: take questions from your audience and respond to them
During the Ideation Lab workshop, Jafri shared important resources like a social media planner, a sample content bank, and multiple websites and apps that she uses to help come up with content ideas and to create & edit content. To get more advice from established professionals and entrepreneurs, consider signing up for ICUBE’s next Ideation Lab offering.
Faria considers herself a business sidekick for entrepreneurs (Robin to your Batman) struggling with optimizing their sales effort and automating their funnels. She helps startups reach their super sales goal without pulling their hair out from funnel anxiety. As an expert in marketing strategy with a Master’s in Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and over a decade of project management experience with a PMP, she teaches business development, digital marketing and sales funnels as a business coach and mentorship coordinator at Diversity Institute. She is committed to promoting a diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem and boosting the economic circumstances for bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Faria is also working on launching her own startup, Haami Bras, to take down the tyranny bras have over breast-owners. After prototyping for 2.5 years, Faria is revving up to launch Haami in 2024.
