Launching a startup is a lot like publishing a book. An author writes a book that he feels society is primed to accept. While he can do some preliminary research to gauge whether his assumption is right, he will still publish the book with a hypothesis. That’s an untested statement about what he thinks to be true.
Startups come to life in much the fashion. An entrepreneur sees a need and designs a product or service around that need. What research he does, is only environmental and he launches the new startup with an untested idea. They trust a new idea into a place where none have gone before. Like that author who needs readers, the entrepreneur needs customers – and both need them quickly.
In each case – the entrepreneur with a startup and the author with his book – you must raise awareness for those new ventures. One way to do that is by using Promoted Tweets to build your following fast.
Speeding Up Growth
Hampton Coffee company @HamptonCoffee wanted to speed up the growth of their follower base and engage loyal, local customers who hadn’t found their business on Twitter. By using Promoted Accounts and pursuing their local market, the company’s Twitter account doubled, increased brand loyalty and generated more active engagement.
From this case study, which you can read in its entirety here, there are three lessons we learn:
- Target customers where they live and work.
- Engage with followers daily.
- Build brand loyalty.
Just targeting promoted tweets, engaging daily and building loyalty isn’t enough if your spam people with useless information. Twitter is a content hungry machine, and the people using it are equally hungry for information. So make your information useful.
Start with Raising Awareness
An awareness strategy is the lowest common denominator for engagement, it’s difficult to measure if your goal it a monetary return on your investment. Your return is a larger follower base, and more website traffic. Unless you dig deeper with sociological research to understand sentiment and perception, use these tips to grow your account, and expect nothing more.
- Tweet three to four times a day.
- Promote your very best content. If you focus on promoting just one tweet, people will be annoyed.
- Use images wherever possible. Tweets with an image perform better because we are a visual culture.
- Post relevant, funny, or purposeful content.
- Change your promoted tweet about every 24 hours.
- Use entertaining, helpful, useful and interesting content, which drives sharing and loyalty.
- Maintain the same voice in promoted tweets that you use in other social media channels.
- Refrain from promoting overly sales-related or marketing tweets.
Folks, this stuff is commonsense. The idea is to be useful and entertaining because that’s why people engage your content. If this his helpful, please let me know.
