What are the ways for startups to build a strong social media following?

There are several ways with which you can make your social media presence prominent. A few tips could be -

1. Don't just put a link on social media profile and expect your audience to take note of them. Individually interact with everyone. A reply to the comment or a like will serve more than just a link or pic. Having a human way of connecting to people has an effect on your audience connecting with you.

2. Have a more understanding of what your audience is looking out for. Provide them what they want. Get a clear understanding of what they want to read about you.

3. Include the social media icons to your website. It will make them easier to connect with your social media profile.


4. Make a social media calendar. Note down your events, blogs and everything that has anything to do with your business. Share them on your social media profile.

5. Post valuable content. Having the good content provides a good exposure to your business presence.

6. Optimise your social media networks with keywords. Check out what your users are searching for and use those keywords on your posts on social media.

7. Use hashtags liberally. They help bring more audience to connect with you. But take enough care while you use them. Do not indulge in stuffing too many keywords.

8. Add your social media icons to your emails. This will grow your social media presence as you send a number of mails each day.

9. Give something in return for those who visit your profile. Be it a free trial, a book or a like back on their profile.

10. Get involved in as many social media sites as you can think of. Do not limit yourself to a select few.

11. Tackle your customer complaints in an efficient manner. Be professional in your responses.

12. Share! Sharing is caring- as the proverb goes. Share your social media presence with everyone you know. They, in turn, will share it with everyone they know. This is the easiest way of reaching out to a wider audience.

When it comes to getting the initial likes and the followers you have to get them from your own sources. For example let's say I have a page on Facebook for which I need likes. I have to get the initial likes from my family and friends. And once you have those likes, you can go ahead and make more likes from viral posts.

1. Post interesting content. When I say interesting, it has multiple meanings. You can post humor, serious post or even something that is trending. Just make sure you are posting something unique. Avoid creating fake news and controversy though. As that hurts your page than it helps in any way at all.

2. Open your page wall for the user messages. This helps get more feedback on the page and you can improve the page accordingly. If you close this section then you are creating a closed loop where people find it harder to report things and even to reach you.

3. Add your website link to your social page profile. Be it twitter or facebook page. Make sure you have website linked to the page. And this helps in getting some viral traffic to the page.

4. Interact : Most of the page admins don't connect with their users. However you should comment on the user comments if it is required. I have found that interaction with the users is not that easy especially on controversial posts.

5. Use services such as Hootsuite, Coschedule, Edgar and Buffer. Those systems can save a lot of your time if you schedule your posts. And you can also measure social signals using those services.

6. Use better images. They attract attention of the users. The more attention you grab the more content will be shared or liked by users.

7. Use your own logo on the images and the videos. Just make sure that you are not using the logo on copyrighted images. Most of the companies like Shutterstock and the Corbis will shut you down if you take their images from google and watermark it.

8. Social media should be used for collecting email leads. So make sure that you are getting people to go to your email sign up page. This helps to get more traffic back to your site using the email marketing. You can also notify them of things that are changed on your website.

9. Use Facebook ads, twitter ads or Linkedin ads to redirect users to the webpage where they can buy your product. If not product you should send them to the email sign up list. Make sure to have moderate budget at first and then increase the cost.

10. Have better landing pages and website design. Don't use typical blog page to get people for mail sign up or to purchase product. Look at some of the landing pages that you can create using Leadpages or similar sites. That way you can make sure that there is less traffic leak. The more traffic you retain using landing page the better it is for you in terms of funding.

Except the ads, most of the methods explained here can be used free of cost. Only deciding factor here is the time. You have to use a bit of automation using tools like buffer and HootSuite and then automate most of the things. Once you start to get likes you can do the sentiment analysis and vary the posting accordingly.