This guest post is by Mischaela Elkins, social media specialist at Cision.
Startup life can be exhilarating. The suspense, the drama, the inevitable reality that you will “wear many hats” and that those many hats will probably also wear many hats. One thing I learned from the two years I put in at travel startup Georama was how to hustle and grow your role beyond your traditional title. While my business card title was social media and community manager, I was given the responsibility to create both the company’s social media strategy and grow its overall PR strategy with the help of an outside agency.
My social media strategy was simple: communicate what the business already did for the consumer using beautiful, compelling, highly shareable content via social networks. This strategy led my company to win the award for Best Use of Facebook in Chicago from Crain’s Chicago Business. I was able to grow my company’s global Facebook community from 150 to 21,000+ using a display advertising budget of around $5 a day. One secret to minimizing time spent and still delivering great content on Facebook is to leverage content curation rather than content creation.
Tips for social media, the startup way:
Don’t worry about quantity of posts, instead focus on quality.
Take the measures which bring about authentic conversations with influencers in your space. You probably don’t have time to shoot the breeze with TwitterUser97 about how their day was. Instead, laser-focus your attention and time on PowerTweeter01 who is highly influential and enthusiastic about your industry, product, or service and talk shop.
Don’t neglect Pinterest! Behind its cute and quirky exterior, this social platform is one of your biggest assets in creating a killer SEO strategy. Create and curate content and link back to your website in every original pin.
Tips for PR, the startup way:
PR is time-consuming and often thankless. I knew that I couldn’t get the kind of placements my company needed all by myself, so I crowdsourced it. I leveraged my entire team and their connections to make new connections and pitch ideas.
Start building your connections early and organically. Reach out to people and see who they know. However, you have to keep in mind that this exchange isn’t a one-way street, you have to give back. Nurture your existing relationships and be sure to get out there and make new ones.
Take advantage of the fact that your startup is new “news.” Journalists are always looking for fresh news and perspectives. Your PR strategy as a startup should center around the fact that you aren’t a heritage brand or a company with years of business experience. In the PR world, it can pay to be the “new kid on the block.”
Use the free editorial calendars tool by Cision. It will give you information on each publication’s coverage, as well as a contact and deadline.
Know when to call in outside help. By leveraging an outside agency, I was able to oversee strategy and execution without putting in the hours and day-to-day efforts. It was a brilliant match. Sometimes you aren’t the best person for the job simply because there aren’t enough hours in a day. Find others who can carry your strategy into execution and help you get results.
For more insight, download our free tip sheet 10 Tips for How PR Pros Should Be Using Social Media, which includes advice from journalists at Columbia University, The New York Times, USA Today and more!
Tags: best practices, PR, public relations, social media
