Social media tools for startups

by Debadrita on March 14th, 2011 2

Social media networks began as a place to connect to friends and dev develop the contacts for sharing their experiences mainly for expanding the relations and exchange the ideas. In no time its universal appeal and popularity began to expand to involve in users’ professional aspirations and even the business organizations, small and large began to utilize the network to expand their marketing operations through it. Many tools to facilitate this came into existence. Now the whole set up has become highly reformed and even complex, for a newcomer to understand and use all the positive benefits one can gain from social media networks.

It is necessary to understand the dynamics of the social media network and how it can be put to your advantage. There are many tools developed for this purpose and here is an attempt to list the important tools that can be employed to benefit the start ups.

Maintaining a blog and letting know the service your company is in position is the simplest way to get your company be noticed and let the word spread on the media. But remember that, this must not take the form of a sales talk about your company or the products in a direct way; otherwise it might be viewed as direct promotion of the services but talk of the people involved or the social aspects of the services or the company that would interest the members to involve in the discussions. You can do this on your own company blog or by registering on wordpress of blogger.com.

YouTube or Flickr offer best platform to share the video presentation of your services and the products. This is the most economic way of making your services or products known to wide public without being considered as intrusive marketing. But the information about the same must be given to interested persons via social media blogs or discussions.

If you feel that your idea is not very unique or that you find it is not easy to build your community of sufficient strength you can use the existing platform of social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Ning. Ning allows you to create your own small community. You can use Facebook or LinkedIn to create your own group or your own Facebook Page, to attract customers by giving all the information about your company and products. Remember the key advantage of using social media rather than having your own independent site. The social media offers unique platform where thousands of people are already there looking for things interesting to them and there is high probability of them chancing upon your work.

Twiiter microblogging is another wonderful tool for spreading small messages across a wide section of the population at no cost. Even Plurk offers this facility.

Social media also provides additional tools like Forums on which you can post your ideas, services and products.

Social media provides most of these tools practically at no cost, by utilizing all these tools the startups can really take off, as the main limitations faced by huge costs of advertisements are eliminated by the use of social media networks.

Image Source : blog.thoughtpick.com

You might also like: