5 Social Tips for Early Stage Founders

Last week, I flew to NYC to host a workshop for crypto founders.

The goal was to equip them with basic social tips they could immediately put into action.

Below you will find a summary of my talk.

Why build a social presence to begin with?

A thriving social presence will help with:

• Sales

• Hiring

• Partnerships

• Fundraising

• User Acquisition

• Product Feedback

• Community Building

I was the head of growth at the last startup I worked at and we were able to immediately drive 1,000 downloads when we first launched our public beta — all thanks to having an online presence.

More on that here.

I have friends who have raised a ton of money, hired their entire team, and landed major partnerships just from having an online presence.

In case you still don’t believe it’s worth the effort, read this:

Ok so how do you do social while running a company?

Your time is limited, you have tons of other pressing priorities, and maybe the content game isn’t really your thing.

Here are 5 tips to help you get started today:

Tip #1: Pick 1 platform

• Select the platform where your community spends the most time 

• Identify 10-20 creators who have your ideal audience

• Follow all of them and study their content

• Set notifications for the top 5 accounts 

• Engage with their content and people in their replies

• Master 1 platform before expanding to a 2nd

Tip #2: Dedicate time to create

• Think of having an online presence as part of your job

• People want to follow people, not brands 

• Dedicate 10% of your time (or more) to this

• Carve out a few hours, once a week to create content in bulk

• Schedule out content for the week ahead using Typefully or Bluecast

• Do daily community management

Tip #3: Use prompts & daily themes

• Prompt examples:

  • “Explain what you do to a novice”

  • “Share the story of how you came up with the idea for your product”

  • More prompts can be found here

• Theme examples:

  • Monday - Thought leadership 

  • Tuesday - Community highlight

  • Wednesday - Company update

  • Thursday - Product marketing 

  • Friday -  Founder reflection

Tip #4: Get support from your team

• If you’re struggling, ask your team to help by:

  • Interviewing you to get stories from you

  • Editing and formatting your content for social

  • Engaging with your posts when they’re live

• Don’t…

  • Have someone run your account for you

  • Overthink it. Get started, get data, then refine

Tip #5: Empower employees

• Think of your employees as “in-house KOLs” 

• Encourage them to share their subject matter expertise online

• Allow them to build an audience and represent the brand

• Leverage your employee network to distribute company content

• Start a Slack channel for company social posts to drive engagement

• Build a culture of being online

In closing, here’s what I think makes for a good founder presence:

• Posts consistently over time

• Engages in the feed regularly

• Shares subject matter expertise

• Doesn’t feel like they are constantly shilling

• Shares personal updates (or hobbies/interests)

• Doesn’t take themself too seriously online

• Doesn’t use social as just a distribution outlet

• Lets their personality shine through 

TLDR

1. Pick 1 social platform to start with

2. Dedicate time every week to create

3. Use prompts & themes to overcome writer’s block

4. Leverage your team to pull stories out of you

5. Empower your employees to build their presence

Bonus: Have fun with it. It’s social media.

Cheers,

Ish

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