The Business Case for Organic Social Media

It feels like I’m starting to hit my stride with this project.

My 4th weekly edition now.

The goal is to build a database of hyper specific marketing content that will help marketers and entrepreneurs grow their brands online.

Thinking of it this way vs a traditional newsletter has helped me clarify the value of each individual post and what I want you as the reader to take away.

I have about 25 other sub topics that I’d like to write about (all within social, growth, & marketing) but would love to hear from you.

Which topics that you’d like me to cover?

Here’s my background in case you have a question related to my experience.

Send me tweet (or 𝕏eet?) @ishvherduzco and I’ll cover it in an edition.

Thank you for being here early with me. 🤝🏽

After talking to tons of startup founders and teams, it seems that social media is usually an afterthought.

Things I’ve heard:

“We will start doing social once we build the product”

“We don’t have time to do social media right now but we will once we are ready to start acquiring users”

“I know I should be doing it but I have a lot of other things to work on”

“We won’t be using organic social to acquire customers so we don’t need it”

As an extremely passionate social media marketer, dozens of responses go through my mind when I hear these things from founders & teams.

To keep this newsletter edition concise, I’ll get right to the point:

Organic Social Media is not a “nice to have”.

It’s a must have for nearly all startups.

There are tons of reasons why, but here are 5 of them based on my 10 year career working in tech.

1/ Discoverability

Whether you like it or not, your customers (and potential customers) are already looking you up online.

They’re going straight to the search bar of their preferred social platform and typing in your company name + a few keywords like to get some social proof before committing to buy or signup for your product. Wouldn’t you want to be one of the top search results for content when they are looking you up? Instead of letting others speak on your behalf, you want to pitch people on who you are, what you’re building, and why they should consider signing up.

The more content you create using different keywords that your target audience is using, the more likely you’ll be to show up in the results.

Try it out right now.

Got to the search bar on X or LinkedIn and type in your brand or company name.

Filter by most recent.

Now look at the words people are frequently using. Are they positive? Negative? Do people have unanswered questions?

You’re leaving a lot on the table by not investing in organic social.

2/ Customer Service & Testimonials

Organic social is how your customers are most likely to reach out to you (before they decide to pick up the phone or send you an email).

Anyone who has led social for a brand knows that a good portion of their mentions are customer service related.

Not all of these are complaints btw — some of these social mentions are actually testimonials from your core audience (which would be super valuable to use as social proof on your website).

Check out some of the mentions that we received at the last startup I worked at.

Organic social is how you make these people feel seen and turn them into super fans (more on this in the community section below).

Take the time to thoughtfully respond to questions and walk people through their issues. They will be more likely be a returning customer or user and publicly advocate for your brand moving forward.

Even if you have a small social team (or just 1 person who works on this part-time), they should be spending a bit of time every day to replying to as many of these injuries as possible (and escalating the recurring issue with the leadership team).

I’d suggest keeping an ongoing doc with all FAQs so that your messaging is consistent over time. This will also save time since you will likely receive the same question(s) over and over again — so you can just copy & paste + a bit of editing to make each reply feel personable.

3/ Community

Probably the most overused word in recent times but it rings to be true here.

Social media is where you begin to build a community of people who love you and what you’re building. Not every follower on social media will be part of your core community but it acts as a funnel and your content over time should help drive people from prospect to follower to customer to community member.

In my last role, I led Growth & Marketing at an early stage startup and organic social was one of the main tools that we leveraged to grow our app to thousands of users across 800+ cities.

There’s no way we could’ve done it without a supportive community of superfans.

This is because your online community also acts as a growth flywheel for your product or service.

When done right, they will act as extension of your marketing team.

Make sure that they know where and how to use your product, where to direct people, and be sure to reward them for their help. This can include exclusive access to private events, branded swag, or free/upgraded accounts for your product.

More on that here and below you’ll find few examples of people in our community who used social to spread the gospel:

How to build community of superfans:

> Attract them - via organic social content & outreach campaigns

> Engage them - via community management, audience questions, events, etc.

> Convert them - via landing pages, closed groups, newsletters, DMs

> Retain them - via rewards, communication, & active listening

= Superfans

4/ Sales

This one is probably the most obvious, but here’s a re-frame for you:

Every piece of social content is like a sales representative that will work 24/7 for you.

Depending on how good the content is as it relates to your target audience will determine their sales performance. One individual post may not convert a ton of people on its own, but hundreds of high quality posts in aggregate will act as a sales army that gets the job done.

And if you’re a founder (or a marketer at a startup) here’s your reminder to start creating content for your account:

Founders usually say one of two things:

1) “I don’t know what to post” 2) “I don’t have time to post”

Some tips on what to post below.

If you don’t have time to post, outsource it.

Hire a part time content coordinator and set an hour every week to answer questions that they turn into content. Review on a weekly basis and have them schedule for the week ahead.

5/ Product Development

Yes, social media can actually help you develop your product.

In my experience, social acts as a consistent feedback loop of people who are actively using your product and find bugs or areas of improvement that you probably wouldn’t have found (especially if you have a lean or nonexistent user experience team).

Like I said in the “customer service” section, people are not shy to call you out when they have an issue. But I’ve also seen so many great ideas and suggestions come from people who have tagged companies that I’ve lead social for.

This can also be reverse engineered.

For example, if you have a shortlist of features that you’re debating on working on for your app, you can directly poll your audience to find out what they’d prefer. Pair this with 1v1 customer interviews and you’ll be able to make a much more informed decision as to which direction you should take your product.

Example below.

If you’re enjoying this series, please send me a tweet @ishverduzco and I’ll feature you on my landing page as a testimonial.

Funny enough, this is one of the business cases for social media like I covered above.

See ya next week,

Ish