Social Media Tips for Entrepreneurs

Startup founders are best-placed to leverage social media for the improvement of their business.

By Kiruba Shankar

As a founder, be actively involved. There’s no one more passionate about your vision and your company like you. Hence, you are best-placed to convey that vision and the unique attitude that your startup possesses. Don’t fully delegate it to another employee or outsource it. Take help, but be intimately involved in social media.

Make the most of the freedom. One of the advantages of running a startup is that you don’t have the baggage of a big company. There are no series of permissions to be secured, no layers of bureaucracy and no corporate communication diktats to be maneuvered. You are free to convey your points of view. Ask the employees of any big company and they’ll tell you that it’s a privilege. Now, go make the most of the freedom.

Keep the conversations active. It is one thing to start up, but a completely different thing to keep the conversations active. Getting onto social media is a two-edged knife. If you aren’t active, then it hurts you more than helps you.
Think long term. Social media is like running a marathon. You’ll need to keep at it consistently. Though you’ll be crazily busy with your startup challenges, this is one area you should not ignore.

Think offline and online. Social media is part of a bigger game plan. This means that you must give sufficient respect to offline promotions as well. For example, you must speak at conferences, use PR to reach out to traditional media, write columns etc. But for each of these, you can use social media effectively to propagate your offline presence strongly.

Blogging is important. Platforms are transient. Remember Ryze, the professional network? That’s gone; today everyone’s using LinkedIn. Remember Orkut? That’s passe and now it’s Facebook. Pretty soon there will be cooler stuff that’ll replace Facebook and LinkedIn. But blogging on your own website remains constant. Never ignore blogging. It acts like old wine, bringing in good SEO benefits to your site.

KIRUBA SHANKAR is the CEO of Business Blogging Pvt. Ltd., a Chennai-based social media consultancy firm.

Tags:
blogging, smetv, social media