Presentation: Social Media Tools for Startups

April 22nd, 2011

[slideshare id=7677126&doc=2011-04-19-blackstone-110419130337-phpapp01&w=500]

I gave a presentation last week to students in the Backstone LaunchPad (opens new window) here at Wayne State about Social Media Tools for Startups (opens new window). My co-presenter was Erica VandenBerg (opens new window) of DHall Ventures (opens new window) who talked about the reasons why and how to approach social media while I talked about the day to day tools.

# Audience

The audience was students who are interested in starting their own businesses. The Blackstone LaunchPad is setup to help them develop their ideas, get resources, funding and set them up for success. The talk was a primer to social media and how to use it from a complete start.

# Start by listening

Setup a central reading post for all mentions of your company, industry and followers so you can keep track of what people are saying about you. It is important to stay up to date with things happening in your industry and with your followers to ensure all your messages stay in context and you can react to your advocates.

# Integrate

The second step should be to integrate social items into your existing properties. People are going to your site already, give them the ability to extend your content into their social networks. At the same time make sure you have the ability to track were and how your items are being shared. This will give you insight into where to be most effective with your messaging.

Lastly it is time to start sharing and interacting. As you start executing your campaigns it is important to also tag all the URL's you share with Google campaign codes. This allows you to see what campaigns are driving the most traffic to your website. Your website should be your "home base", it is where you should be driving all of your traffic. On your website you want to ensure you have calls to actions on every landing page.

# Tie to goals

Within Google Analytics you can setup goals and even assign a dollar value to goals. Over time you will be able to see all the visitors who complete these goals and which campaigns and items drove the most amount revenue. In the end using social tools are just a gateway to solving problems and driving more traffic to do business. Not every Tweet or Facebook message needs to be tied to a campaign but make sure long term campaigns are in place so you're not just spinning your wheels.

# Resources

Just as a side note, this presentation is meant to be a primer to social media. More detailed technical information available upon request.