Describe your past practices, present uses, and future expectations for social media involvement in starting a new business.

Please message me if you are interested in mentoring me as I learn and startup.

There are three phases that new businesses will phase:

1) Traction

You first start out and may not be receiving a lot of responses to any of your posts.  The secret is to keep building new relationships and staying consistent, this is probably the hardest parts and a lot of businesses fail on social media due to lack of persistence.

2) Momentum

Now things are really starting to take off; you are getting more Likes/Followers and more engagement on a daily basis.  This is the point where you want to spend more emphasis on enhancing current relationships with your fans and really build a strong connection.

3) Expansion

This phase is when you decide to take your business beyond the current social media page.  Some people try to talk their facebook fans to follow them on twitter, or their twitter followers to like them on Facebook.  The key is to focus on mastering one platform and then start putting the same commitment into another.

Hope that helps dude!

@donpurdum @traehutchison @theodoresturos

All of the ideas that have been mentioned so far are ones I agree with. I especially agree with @donpurdum ‘s suggestions of ‘doing the hard work of defining who you want to target’ and inviting guest bloggers.

The key to improving your social media presence, or really your online presence in general, is going above and beyond creating great content on your pages and create great content in the forms of responses, comments, questions, and advice on other peoples pages too.

If you have a startup then I assume that you are acting through your Facebook business page. Choose the option to ‘act as the page’ and find businesses that are within your market or have similar interests and like their pages. Make a habit to check your newsfeed (still acting as the page) every day for 30 minutes or so and like their updates, make interesting comments, etc. The more you interact meaningfully with other pages the more they’ll want to know who you are and what your business does and start then interacting with you too.

And, even if they don’t start interacting with you right off the bat (which they probably won’t–these things take time to build) they will still probably check your page to see what you’re about since you left a comment on their page or liked one of their updates. They’ll find out a little bit about you and that will be one more business who knows you exist and what services or products you offer. Creating awareness like this is another big part of growing your company via social media.

I’d be happy to help you out and mentor you as well if you have any more questions. Perhaps with @theodoresturos and I both giving you some insight and mentoring advice you’ll be a ‘pro’ before you know it! Two heads are always better than one

@donpurdum no problem! It’s such a great way to improve your FB business page and it really doesn’t take much time as long as you try and plan to do it each day.

social media should work in this order

1.  create (the profiles)
2.  write (the content)
3.  spread (the word)
4.  engage (with audience)
5.  repeat (steps 2 to 4 consistently)

thats the short of it.  the long of it is far too long and opinionated to be listed here.

the most important thing(s) to remember is that it takes time (so be patient) and enjoy yourself (so have fun!).  at the same time keep in mind that it is for a business after all, and so you may need to keep yourself “in check” if you find youre spending too much time on it.

happy to help like the rest of the brilliant peeps on here 

@traehutchinson Anytime dude! You have some great support in here