What most people don’t tell you about how your startup can benefit from social media

Marcus Ho is a social media strategist to best-in-class businesses in Asia. He has helped over 200 corporations ranging from MNCs to fast-emerging startups to increase sales through social and digital campaigns. He’s also the author of Social Payoff.

As a startup, chances are the best way to reach out to your target market will be through online marketing. And while email marketing and direct response marketing may be effective, it is also wise for your startup to take a look at social media as a viable marketing platform too (if you haven’t already done so.)

Now, we all know how pervasive social media is among any group of consumers, but many fail to see the potential in social media marketing. Some firms perceive that social media ROI, such as likes, shares, and comments, are not actually beneficial to a company.

Are you thinking along those lines? If you are, here are three reasons why social media marketing can work for your startup:

1. Listen to your audience

Social media marketing offers one unique aspect of research that any other form of marketing research cannot achieve: access to wide-range market feedback at an extremely low cost. Social media listening tools come at only a fraction of the cost you will incur for traditional research.

Another reason social media listening is the way to go is the ability to measure how your audience is feeling about your product or service and its industry. Here’s a portion of a social media listening report:

This part of the report shows the tally of an online conversation (in this case, blood donation), and also includes the overall sentiment of the conversations. Social media enables marketers to not only measure conversations but also measure the sentiment behind the conversations. That is a very important asset for marketers and can make or break a potential social media campaign depending on its tone and execution.

And that’s not even your best reason for using this channel. Social media listening tools are not just cost-effective, they’re also more specific. So many people are on social media now and one cannot even begin to fathom how much data exists on the internet. Social media listening can give you access to a wider range of factors from which you can gather info, as well as the ability to better customize your demographical research.

So here’s a recap of what social media listening can offer: a much wider sample size and more customizing options, for a lower cost.

See: 7 awesome QR code marketing campaigns

2. Build your own community of passionate fans

Here’s the inevitable truth: the cost of running a startup has been rising steadily over the past few years, and advertising is getting more and more expensive in order to secure leads and a profitable sales margin. The solution for any startup owner, right now, is to reduce your marketing and advertising cost while increasing its effectiveness.

3. Generate leads