Social Media Marketing for Startup Founders with Andrew Lee Miller

Hello, hello everyone. My name is Ehan. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have an awesome, awesome, awesome session lined up today. We have Andrew Miller with us. He's a startup expert, growth connoisseur, like marketing guru. There's multiple names we can give him, but you know, if you're joining in today, you probably come here to hear him speak, not me. We will be bringing him up on stage shortly, but in the meantime, we're just waiting for everyone to trickle in. We've had over 400, and I think 450 people register for this session. For this webinar, so I think we'll get a few hundred to come in. So as people are getting in, let us know in the chats where you're coming in from. You know, let's think from the registration I saw, we have people from all around the world. So if you want to, you have a chat on the right-hand side. Okay, we have Austin coming in from Dublin. Hey, Austin. Scott from LA, Indiana, Denmark, Andrew's American-based, based in Mexico. We were just chatting offline. He was also based in Dubai. My name's Eyal, like I said, I'm based in Dubai, UAE. Originally also spent a lot of time in Toronto, Canada, so float between the two. We have Berlin, Vancouver, Boston. This is awesome. We have a lot of cool things, a lot of different cities coming in. London. All right, awesome. Bharat, do you wanna bring up Andrew? Get him up and like do a couple words and then just, um, just kind of go from there. I guess while some housekeeping is going on, um, hey Andrew!

Hello, hello everyone! Really excited, these people from Sweden, Toronto, Austria, Madrid. Salaam alaikum to anybody Muslim. Buenas noches.

Andrew was telling me off screen, he's been a digital nomad for 10 years doing what he does. So I'm sure people want to be asking questions about that. So everyone, just very high-level agenda. We're going to have Andrew speak for about 40 minutes, then we're going to go into Q&A on the right-hand side. You can see right next, below the chat button, there's a Q&A button. Please put your question in there. I will take the the last maybe 10 minutes to do the top 4 questions. If we upload it, Ask Andrew, we'll do it publicly after this session. We're gonna break out into tables. You'll see these virtual tables everywhere. Andrew will have his own dedicated table. You can go there, ask him questions. He's promised to stick around for a few minutes, so please take advantage of that. And then there'll be all general networking. So go speak to everyone, speak to your peers, learn more about social media. but without further ado, let me read Andrew's bio here. Like it's a one-liner because he does a much better job of explaining, but yeah, Andrew Lee Miller, he's a startup marketing expert from Silicon Valley. He's driven 3 exits and he's also the author of Startup Growth Book. We will throw the links into the chat, but also in the email that we send out, we're gonna send a replay of this event with the link to the book if you guys want to see it as well. Without further ado, Andrew, I'm going to kick it over to you.

All right. If you want to screen share.

Yeah. Why don't you start screen sharing? We're 3 minutes in. 100. Yeah, we have 111 people live. I think we'll probably get another 50 over the next couple of minutes. So, but yes, awesome. Stage is yours.

Awesome. All right, everybody, how we doing? We're going to go as slow as I possibly can, which is still probably too fast. So if you have questions, put it in the chat. Like I said, we're going to have people upvote those. I'm not looking at your questions, so just keep asking them in there. And the top questions, uh, I'm gonna ask at the end. We're gonna have plenty of time for questions, so keep yourself muted. You don't need to interrupt me. I promise we'll get to them. If I don't answer your question, you'll be able to drop into a room with me afterwards, and I'm going to be answering everything I can private, one-on-one with you. And then if even that isn't enough, you can find me at Andrew Startups on social media, and you can bother me with any questions you have. So what are we gonna be talking about today? You know, if you think social media, you probably don't think of a bald old dude trying to tell you, but I have successfully grown several businesses via social media without having to do it for the gram, without having to really grow followers, without having to struggle to make content every day. And so this is gonna be a very unique talk because I'm not gonna be telling you how to do your TikTok and how to just grow with likes and followers. I'm going to be showing you how to actually grow your business using social media with very minimal time investment. But first, why in the heck should you listen to me? Like I said, you, when you think social media, you don't think of this, right? But social media is like the most important digital marketing channel. I'm going to show you data to back that up, and it has been very successful for me. I even literally met my wife through some of these strategies on social media. I'm not kidding you. So even if it's not super aligned with your business, which it should be. I made these strategies super blanket across any industry, any segment, as long as you're early stage and you need to grow. This is going to really help you. But why should you listen to me? I started my career 16 years ago in digital marketing with startups, and in the first 10 years I drove 3 startup exits. Over the last 7 or 8 years, I've consulted on dozens of projects since that third exit. I wrote a book called The Startup Growth Book. You can find it on Amazon in every country in the world. If it's not on Amazon after this, show me proof and I'll send you a free copy, and then I will yell at Amazon so you'll help me out. But it should be available. And you know, that's the difference is I've been teaching growth all over the world. I'm speaking in Dubai next month and speaking in London, then speaking in Barcelona, and all I do is go around the world and teach startup founders. If you're listening in from Africa, I've been there too. I've taught in Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, I love teaching startup founders growth, and I have very unique strategies focused on helping bootstrap early-stage startups. If you raise a ton of money, then you don't really need to do all these aggressive growth hacking strategies, but that's not who my target is. I'm trying to help you. So I also want you to take a second and post and comment in the chat about your business. Tell me where you're at, what segment you're focusing on, what area you're focusing on. Is it B2B? Is it B2C? Are you pre-launch? Write a little paragraph about your business. I'm going to look through it right after the talk, and then I'm going to be curating some of those answers to those questions to your business. Okay, so drop that in there. We usually take some time out, but I'm going to keep going because I want to make sure we have enough time to really go over all the questions that everyone has. So comment in there though, because I want to know what you're working on. So first Social media is often the biggest mistake or the area where founders make the most mistakes for. And there's really two main reasons why. One, we're all constantly advertised to that we need to grow our social following, right? You— it's kind of like a social factor, right? Oh, you don't have a lot of followers. Well, the most successful founders in Silicon Valley don't use social media, really, honest. Yes, I know that you can grow a community and it's becoming massively important, The larger your community, the more you can leverage that. But that's not really what we're gonna be focusing on. It can be a massive, massive time suck for founders because they think it's so important to grow their social. So, but you see there's all these different marketing channels that you need to focus on, yet constantly in surveys, this is a survey of 400 B2B marketers last year from HubSpot. B2B founders and marketers still think that social media is the most important thing to focus on, as opposed to the actual biggest problem in marketing is generating leads and traffic, whether you're B2B and B2C. So I'm going to be focusing on how you can use your social media and to actually generate traffic and leads and exposure for your business, as opposed to all the vanity metrics of just followers and likes that might not actually, um, turn, move the needle for your business. Okay, the first thing is social media is a crazy place nowadays, and there's a couple main reasons, and I want everybody to understand it. I hope that everybody knows what ChatGPT is. We're not going to take a huge time to talk about it. If you don't know, please write the note to investigate that. It is a brand new and extremely powerful AI tool that is currently still free to be able to use that to write your copy, to write your posts for your social media, to write your blogs, to write the content that you need to create. It can really remove some of the gaps for some founders in the time investment. So that is a really powerful thing for people to investigate. We're not going to make this entire talk about ChatGPT, although we could easily. Second real big trend in social media right now is that video is king. And soon there's going to be a video version of ChatGPT, if there isn't already out there. Maybe not from OpenAI like ChatGPT is, but a tool that will help you make fake, deepfake videos of yourself for social media. So eventually you'll be able to hack that. I don't know what that tool is yet. If somebody's using it, you can comment in the chat and I will give you a shout out to my 20,000 social media followers. But video is really king for your own personal social media. Another thing to talk about is people still always ask, Andrew, is social media really important? Well, there's yeses and there's nos. No matter what, even if you're pre-launch, you should be posting about your business from the very beginning. You can earn market share, you can get that first mover advantage, you can build a beta list of users. So yes, social media is pretty much always important, but like I said on my first slide, the worst thing you can do is spend a ton of time creating a bunch of content for your pages and then post it or spend a bunch of effort scheduling or posting every day and not get much of an effect. So I'm going to teach you how to hack that. And another confusing thing is there's like 10 different channels, right? We, oh, do I create posts for IG and then repost it everywhere? And really the answer to that is based on where do you think your customers and your target demographic are? That's one thing. The second thing is you should really focus on where you have a proclivity or where you have a passion to create. If you are someone like me that doesn't mind being on video, then you should lean into that and do more video-related stuff. If you're an excellent writer and you feel like it's easier for you to write, then maybe you should focus on Twitter and LinkedIn. It also depends on what your goals and your targets are. So this is a very hard topic for me to just talk to anyone around the world about. So you see a lot of the things I'm gonna say are very broad, but you need to customize it based on what resources you have, what your customers are and where they are, and what your goals are as a founder, okay? Then the last part that a lot of people don't know is social media is pay to play. It is not free to grow your social media. Yes, if you're brand new on a new channel, like if you were 2 years ago on TikTok and you're doing something for the first time, you can get quite a bit of virality, but you better believe that anybody you see scaling rapidly on social media is spending money. It is. They're either supported by agencies or they're supported by a budget, or there's, you know, it's just once you get some organic virality, you need to pay to play to grow your socials. So instead, we're gonna get there in a second, but instead I'm gonna show you how to focus off of your own pages to grow your social media and really limit the time investment to growing your own pages until you really know what's working and you can scale that up, okay? Before we get into it, you need to have tracking set up. So many times, doesn't matter where in the world, I see startup founders frivolously spend their time budget hoping to get to when they have money to invest or money to work on their startup, then they will get really tight with the money budget. But that's actually wrong, y'all. I want you to start tracking your time investment in your marketing, not just in social, in anything that you do with your startup. But whenever I do these talks, the first question afterwards is, Andrew, there's so much you've talked about. How do I know what to do first? Well, if you start testing and tracking your time investment, you can figure out what I call your return on time investment, and then you can start to learn what will be most efficient by the time you get money to invest. So don't start testing any growth channels if you don't have KPIs set up and tracking set up, and then don't make any decisions on your gut. Maybe you started a business before that was really successful, Maybe you have a mentor who did this before you and they think, she thinks, or he thinks they know what they're talking about. The more you rely on human gut and human decision-making, the more mistakes you will make as a startup founder. When you test and you rely on data, you make much less mistakes. And the same goes with social media. You know, you're going to— I'm going to teach you how to use a scheduling tool that's going to start posting your content across every page. And with that, you're going to see on your Google Analytics or your Flurry, your mobile analytics, or wherever analytic tools you're using. Hopefully you can get more than one because you want to have, you know, real confidence that they're correct. And if you have two, then you know that the data is more accurate if they're aligned, right? If you can do that, then you can start to make better bets on where to invest your time. And then with that, by the time you have money to invest to grow your social media, or to grow any of your channels, you have absolute confidence on the landing pages, the products, the pricing, the type of content that people are responding to, the channels that people are responding to. So tracking is extremely important. And for my friends in Dubai or India, you might think ROTI is something else, it is, but I coined this term return on time investment because I love early stage startups. We think about ROI as only being related to our money investment, But what is the one thing that we all have in common with billionaires? We have the same amount of time. Yes, they can augment their team to do more in the same amount of time, but you are the chief everything officer of your company. You have a limited amount of time to invest in marketing, and that's why it often is overlooked for early-stage companies. So I'm going to ask you to create a Google Meet meeting for yourself. A couple hours per week on social media is really all you need to do. And you're going to be able to analyze that time investment. Where was I spending those couple hours? Okay, more people are coming in from Twitter, so I'm going to push more time into my time budget into that. So if you can spend your time budget as wisely as your money budget, then you're going to know a lot of those answers that investors are going to want to know, and that's going to help you raise money. Okay, so, okay, how to grow via social media. And again, I'm looking forward to all the questions. There is no one blanket way to grow from social, but as I've seen for 16 years, early stage startup founders struggle with this. I'm gonna make it just consumable and easy for you in this one meeting, okay? The first thing I'm gonna help you outta do is create a batch of content. You spend one day per month creating the content you wanna post on your own pages. Then you're gonna schedule that content across all the pages that you wanna test. Okay? And that can be video content if you have the ability to create it, or it can just be graphics and text, whatever you want it to. I have so many examples online that I can show you after this, or if we break out in a meeting, of people who've scaled doing each of those, but it's whatever you think you have the ability to do, okay? Then we're gonna use that extra time while those posts are happening every day, you're showing that your brand is really active, you're, you know, building that rapport with the search engines, you're owning those hashtags that we're gonna talk about, you're getting the benefit of posting every day, but you're not spending the amount of time it takes to do it. So, Andrew, what should I do in the meantime? I'm gonna show you how we can go off of your own pages to start building a community in a much better, stronger, faster, more powerful way, okay? I have these terms. If you know SEO, we use on-page and off-page SEO, but there's actually the same connotations for social media, and I coined this actually first in my book ever. If you read it, it's called The Startup Growth Book, but on-page social media is a different strategy than off-page. The problem that I talked about at the beginning of this talk is that people get stuck on the on-page social. Oh, what are we gonna post today? What's gonna be valuable? Should we show a picture of the office? Like, oh my God, Andrew, we're gonna talk about how to quickly schedule and create very low impact value for your followings, even if you're pre-launch on your own pages. So that's the posting regularly, creating content, using the hashtags, you know, staying consistent, tagging other people. All that stuff is really valuable, but it's not valuable enough to spend hours per day when you're an early stage startup. That's just the bottom line. So many times, you guys, I see startup founders spend 3 weeks creating their first batch of content. Scheduling it, you know, we hired someone, maybe even designer. There's a cost associated to that beyond even the time. Then you start posting and what do we get? 10 likes, 20 likes, 0 likes. It's just— and then we see it's not worth it and we stop doing it for a long period of time. That's the worst case scenario. So instead, we use the software that I'm going to talk about to schedule the regular posting so that we show people that we're active. That we start to build exposure in those hashtags and in those communities. And then we use that time to instead go off of our own pages, which nobody talks about as a solid strategy. You can do it immediately, whether you're B2B or B2C, you're gonna be able to find events that are going on, the most popular hashtags, competitors that you wanna analyze and get inspiration from, influencers in the space, speaking opportunities, PR opportunities. Off of your own social media pages. You can even get massive amounts of free exposure in existing communities where your customers are. You know, it takes years and tens of thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of hours in creating content to build that community that you own. Obviously, that's the goal eventually, but in the near term, you can go off of your own social media pages and start commenting often, posting in groups, monitoring the hashtags, cold messaging potential partners and leads, and resharing other people's posts to get even more exposure. And that's really what we're going to spend most of the time talking about today, okay? But definitely feel free to ask me questions about, oh, what about this particular TikTok strategy and video? You know, that's fine. So the first thing I want you to do is to start a Google Doc after this talk if you haven't already really been premeditated in what you're posting on social media. This is a great way to get a bird's eye, 1,000-foot view of what you should be talking about. So I want you to create a social media strategy for your on-page social media for your business. This is the actual social media strategy for Hive, the company I'm working with right now. We're launching a new fintech app in the United States. It just raised millions of dollars. And again, B2C startup, very, very focused on social media. but to get in the beginning pre-launch, let's create a strategy, let's stick to it. And then this is gonna help you in that one day a month in creating a lot of that social media content. So what I want you to do is think about what do we wanna talk about and break it down into percentages. The reason we do this is I want you to stick to this strategy. This is a testing, right? So we're gonna be testing this with our content. So first we think about the percentages of what we wanna talk about. And then I'm not gonna show you this company's actual content because that, you know, they didn't want that. But what you can do from this framework is then think of content ideas after that into another doc or right below this inside of each one. Oh, so we're gonna talk about people. What is the 4 or 5 ideas for types of posts that we can talk about along that category, right? What you're gonna have after you finish this is a list of 10 to 20 different types of posts that you can do every month. You know, oh, this is a good idea, this is a good idea, to test it. You can rely on other people in your team, friends and family. You can look at examples from competitors or mentors or people in the market. The idea is to write all this out so that you're not in thinking a guessing game every time that you're doing the social media content creation. Once a month, I tell people, do it at the very beginning of the month. You create the content. I'm sure you already know about Canva. If you don't know, canva.com, you can create Really, really great image content there. If you want to do video but you don't have access, you can use promo.com, P-R-O-M-O.com, $50 a month. You can create unbelievable video content on there using B-Reels and AI voices. And then obviously, eventually, hopefully get yourself into the social media content or your team or your influencers or the product, all of that stuff. You put that into a list of a social media strategy here. You run it by other people, you get their advice, you tweak it, and then you use this as a framework for creating content every month. I hope that makes sense, and I'm skipping over it pretty quickly because this is what I want you to do. I want you to just spend a little bit of time posting on your own pages and not really investing hours per day because you're not going to grow your business that way until you really have either an extremely unique content strategy that, you know, you're still gonna need to probably spend a little bit of money on and/or money to grow your social media following. I totally agree with all the other experts out there that growing your community is really important, but at the very early stage, it takes, it's a content thing, right? You know, starting a podcast takes 90 to 120 days before it really starts to take off. SEO and blogging, same thing, really long-term strategy. That's how you should look at your on-page social media. It is not going to be a business driver in the early phases of your business, but you cannot skip over needing to post every day. If you're talking to investors or you are running ads or you're, you know, even organic on the App Store or whatever, oftentimes when people hear about your business, let's say you're doing a B2B company and you're doing outreach. A lot of B2B companies think that social media strategy is not important. Andrew, we need to get leads. That's not— it is true, you need to get leads, but if you get a message on LinkedIn from a business or Twitter or an email, one of the first things you do, right, is you check to see if they're on your favorite social media and are they active, are they a legitimate business. Just like having a nice web design, this sends a really great subconscious signal to businesses and potential customers and users that you're a legitimate business. Believe it or not, the same thing goes with Google. Social media activity and the amount of followers you have is a strong signal for ranking on Google. They have it— they don't really admit it, but I would bet it's the same thing on the App Store with Apple. So even if you're a mobile-first business, they are subconsciously behind the scenes looking at how active you are on social media. So even if you're B2B, it's very important to be posting regularly but like I said, the worst thing I can see you do is spend all your time on this. Okay? So drop some questions in there. I'm happy to go over deeper on creating a social media strategy, but that's really job number one for is get your analytics set up. What are your social media KPIs? You know, obviously you want, if you're a website on your analytics, you're gonna wanna see the time, the session time, average pages per session, and then whatever your conversion is if you're a web business. Coming from social. Oftentimes, social referrals are really some of the strongest quality visits to a site. That's because they've been watching you post regularly, they've learned about your business, they're ready to convert by the time they come to your website. So your analytics is job number one. Job number two, you guys, is getting a social strategy set up. So we're not just blindly posting, you know, it's actually better to not post than to post something that's not really valuable. So when you're creating this list, it's what's gonna be valuable for, you know, maybe that's educating about the problems that you're solving. Maybe that's, you know, talking about the features of the product that you're creating. But then also it could be memes, it could be facts about your industry that you're thinking about, things that your customers or your target demographic will engage in. Doesn't always have to be about your business. It can be about your industry, your problem. I mean, I, You could talk about competitors, but I wouldn't really recommend that. I need to know more about your business. All right, then you're gonna pick your favorite social media scheduling tool. Let's imagine it's the 5th of the month. Now you've got that 30 days worth of content created. It's easier than you think. I know it might sound crazy, but if you really go over it and after a few months, you really get into a nice vibe of creating a bunch of content. I like later.com, later.com. It is $20 a month and you can schedule up to 100 posts a month. You can schedule stories, you can schedule videos, and it's an incredibly simple scheduling tool that also gives you very deep analytics as well. You can also use Hootsuite, you can use Planoly, you can use, um, I mean, so many different scheduling tools out there. This is my preferred tool because it's Instagram first, and that's really still, I mean, depending on what industry and region of the world you're in, that's still the main focus. So I often tell people, create the video and the images for Instagram and then post it everywhere else. That's going to be your most active channel usually. You know, TikTok, you can schedule it on here, but you need to have video content the right way. So, you know, we're going to talk a little bit less about TikTok this time, but if that's really your focus and you have a younger target demographic, then you can definitely put that into your strategy. But this tool is amazing because you just upload all the images right here in this little upload thing. Then you see all of the content that you wanna schedule, and it's a very simple calendar drag and drop. It could not be easier. It will take you, you know, about 40 minutes to schedule all of the posts. Usually what we, I tell people to do is after you've created all of the posts, put 'em into a Google Doc. Put underneath each post the text and the hashtags you want to use. This tool also has a hashtag discovery tool. If you don't have any idea how to— you don't want to use this, you have no budget, you can also just open up any social media platform that you want to use and you can enter in a hashtag, you know, for instance, #startups, and you can see how active they are and you can really understand what hashtags you want to use. As far as a blend I mean, as far as a hashtag strategy, you're looking for a blend of high traffic and low competition. So if you can see that there's posts and there's a lot of activity there, but it's not a lot of potentially competitive brands and it's regular users, then that's something that you really want to jump on. If it's a hashtag that's not really used at all, but you can totally own it and maybe, you know, you get exposure to a few dozen or 100 people at a time, or a year or a month with that, that's still cool if it's really, really on brand. You know, I mean, some companies I work with will make a specific hashtag just for that business. You've all seen it with companies. And we, you know, that's a long-term strategy. We're going to own that whole hashtag. Well, with the more popular ones, the goal is to just get exposure to the people who are monitoring, following, and using those hashtags and checking them themselves. That's why we include those hashtags in the post. It's so that we can get discovered by people who are looking at those things and potential customers. Okay? So you want, you know, 5 to 10 hashtags on the post, depending on, you know, again, if it's Twitter, you have less exposure or space there, but overall you're gonna schedule your post. That's job number 3. And then you're gonna kind of set and forget it. And you can go back, if you have a weekly marketing meeting with your team, you can look at these later analytics. They actually email it to you as well if you even forget. On a weekly cadence, and you'll start to see over time between Later and your other analytics source what is really working the best for the KPIs that you have. Obviously, you'll be able to easily see what's growing your following. Oh, whenever I post a video of me, that's when people, um, grow— when people engage the most. Okay, I'm going to double down on that in month 2. So the idea is that through these months, you start to figure out with very minimal time investment, what type of content, what platform, what hashtags is really leading to people engaging with you the most. And very quickly, in less than a quarter, with no spend and very little time, you will get an idea of where your customers are, what you need to focus on. And then when you do have some money, that's when you can really grow that channel or promote that type of content. That's really the secret to your on-page social media marketing. And I'm sure there's questions. All right, let's imagine all that stuff is done. This is where the fun stuff is. Gimme one second. Now, this is my favorite thing to do in the world on the internet is go through social media and generate leads and opportunities for my life, my customers, my friends, and I'm gonna show you how to do it. So imagine all of your stuff is scheduled. You know that you're posting regularly. You're just putting in a couple hours or an hour a week to really look back at what's going good. Well, what are you going to do with the rest of your time? Let's say you have, you know, we all spend hours a day on social media. Most of that is completely worthless, but I'm going to show you how you can actually use social media as a tool to get whatever you want out of life. So we're going to focus on showing you how to test potential targets, you know, add, follow, and cold message and find people through social media. And then testing different types of messages. So you can learn all of these things through doing outreach through social media, okay? You know, outreach for anyone that's not in B2B and doesn't know what I even mean by that, I mean reaching out. There's really only two types of marketing, you guys, just so you know. There's inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Write those two things down. It's different for every business, but a lot of times inbound takes quite a lot of time, like I was talking about. Creating the things, the satellites that float out there in the universe that bring people to your business. And this is going to be more of an outbound strategy that you can start right away to start driving interest and leads for your business. Okay, I'm going to focus on Twitter because I'm in B2B. Most of the startups I work with are B2B, and LinkedIn and Twitter are generally the most popular B2B channels because people are ready to be approached in a business sense through there, okay? So first I'm going to show you in the tool how to do this. So if you go to Twitter, you can literally search for whoever your customers might be or your users. And these are things that keywords that people use to self-qualify them. So if you are, um, I don't know, a fintech startup in Dubai looking for investors, you might put startup investor Dubai in the keywords here and click people, and you will see a list. Obviously, this is a great strategy for growing your following, follower base as well. But what I'm going to do is, I mean, this is the first thing I want you to do is just let's say you just started, you're posting, you want to grow your follower base. This is what you should do. You can go in, you know, there's a limit. You're not going to follow hundreds and hundreds of people every day, but this is a great way for growing your follower, following base and valuable people. Everyone on Twitter that you follow, they're going to get an email. They're going to get a notification in the app. They're not going to get an SMS, but almost. They're going to get a ton of updates about you, and then they're likely going to follow back. Nobody cares if you have 1,000 people you're following and only 300 people following you. It doesn't matter. You can unfollow them later on. It's, again, vanity metrics. That shit doesn't matter. What matters is that you have valuable people following you so that you can get engagement and real data in that content that you're posting every day. So go into these tools. Again, this can be a 30-minute task once a week to go into a tool, follow 20, 30 people, forget about it. You know, on LinkedIn, you can go, um, to your business page and you can invite all your personal contacts to follow your business page. This is going to create exposure for you, but also get started on a network effect. A network effect, or network effects rather, is a term for social media when you're starting a new social media platform. That once you have a large enough community, it drives an effect. It's almost like a subconscious effect that other people have FOMO from not following you. So when you have a very low following, it's unlikely that other people will just want to follow. But if you have a couple hundred people and they see, oh wow, it's connections that I have also, like me, following him, then they're more likely to follow you. Okay, so this is off of Twitter. This is a tool called TweetDeck. You can't see it on here, I don't think, but TweetDeck, amazing, amazing search engine for tweets, okay? There's millions of tools I could go over, we don't have all the time. This is one of the most powerful tools for social media in general, let alone for Twitter, but tweetdeck.com, like the deck, presentation deck. It is an amazing tool because you can search in real time by keyword or by hashtag and see anyone posting around the world. With those keywords. So no matter what you're doing on your own pages, you can use this tool to find potential opportunities with events, partners, customers. If you know, what is one of the first things we do when we complain or when something bad happens to us? We go to social media to complain about it. Well, your job as a startup founder is to solve a problem that people have, whether B2B or B2C. You know, with B2B maybe the customers aren't really gonna go and complain, but they're gonna be on here talking about something and you're gonna be able to find them. On the B2C side, you'd be so surprised. You can find people in real time having the problem that you solve, you guys. Amazing opportunity to get feedback, to shoot it out to them. This is what it looks like. In real time, you can respond. So I was in Thailand recently and, you know, I was looking for something to do. So I searched Chiang Mai tonight. Immediately you can see, and I'm like, oh, Actually, it looks like I was trying to promote a talk that I was doing or something like that. So I was instantly able to promote my talk to people in the city. So you can also use keywords for your city, which will geolocate it. You can use hashtags related to your industry. It's just an amazing way for very low time investment. Once you have a column set up for every single potential conversation, You can just leave this tab open and put 10 minutes a day, I'm gonna go and interact with people in my industry, in my network, and potential customers. You will see very quickly in your analytics, going back to what I was talking about, that it's extremely, extremely powerful, and you will see, and you'll be able to invest more and more time on that, okay? So social media is also not just Instagram and Facebook and stuff. Reddit is social media. Quora is social media. Facebook groups are social media. LinkedIn groups, massive amounts of value for you to be going there. So what I want you to do is, as you start to see on TweetDeck and other places from Googling, I want you to create a list. I call it the content distribution list, but it can be your social media list as well of all of the places online that you discover in real time as you're doing it. Subconsciously, this list is going to grow. All the hashtags, all of the hashtags and keywords that you're tracking in TweetDeck, all of the Facebook groups, all of the major questions on Quora, all of the subreddits that are related to you. You'd be surprised, there's often like 3 to 4 different subreddits that'll be really related to your business and your problem that you're solving. All of these places, I want you to go there every time you write a new blog, every time you get interviewed, every time you make a really good social media post that you see getting some organic virality, you can take it and you can distribute it in these places and you'll get even more exposure. It's not, hey guys, I'm trying to sell this. You're gonna get shut down on Reddit. You're supposed to be creating value. But if you write a piece of content, the top 10 ways that your customers can do benefit with this, then that content can go and be distributed in all of these places. And that's also tons of social media juice, all right? So you have to very quickly gain a holistic view of what social media really means to your business. You see, I skipped over very quickly in the beginning what we all assume is social media, and I'm focusing on all the other things that people don't really focus on. And you can, without any spend, without any budget, find customers, get exposure, test out, and get beta feedback. All these things you can do with time investment and no money investment. All right, I know that we're probably running a little bit low on time here, so I want to get into the other thing that I think is amazing to do in social media and a huge opportunity for startup founders. Whether you've raised $1 million or you've helped 1 million people or you're just about to launch, I want you to be able to get into the media to talk about your startup. And you can find all of these opportunities via social media, doing a lot of the same things I just talked. So really quickly, and Aihan, cut me off if I run out of time, but PR and earned media is a great way to get exposure. Off of social media that you can then take that article and do what I just said and then repost it in all of those groups. So getting podcast interviews, getting speaking opportunities, getting interviewed in the local media or written media around your industry, niche media. You know, if you're in the hotel world or travel, you know, travel magazines, hotel magazines, getting interviewed in there is going to get you a lot of exposure, but also create thought leadership and make you the expert that you need to be for people to trust your company. Well, how do you do PR, Andrew, without a PR agency? I'm gonna go really into it as a function of social media. PR is just really crafting the story, going back to that strategy, kind of the same, building a PR database. So that list, like I was talking about, of all the places you're gonna distribute it, it's the same for the media. And then PR distribution is just distributing that press release. And then you gotta obviously learn how to talk to the media. So you can go to Twitter and TweetDeck like I said, and you're gonna be able to find a lot of people on there saying that they're a reporter. If you go to Twitter at that first screen I showed you, if you search tech reporter, you'll see a lot of tech reporters have their email in their bio because they actually want people to reach out to them with opportunities. But let's say you don't do that. I want you to go to Google Alerts and search the keywords that are related to your business, your problem, your market, your industry, your competitors, whatever it is that you're— the problem you're solving. And you're going to find articles. They're going to email you on them every morning and you can go through those articles. And this is just an example. I found an article about startups that I really liked. I clicked on the author's name and boom, I have their email address and/or their Twitter there every time. You guys, 100% of the time it's one or the other. Okay? If not, then I take the name and I go to Google and I find their social media on my own. Okay, let's say they didn't have the email. Oh, if you have the email address, great. You can, you can start building the list like I was talking about. If not, I'm gonna go to Twitter and I'm gonna say, hey, what's your email? I have a story for you. DM. Of course, that is the value for them. You guys, they want to get the best possible tech stories in their region or their area. So you can start to build a social media following of reporters, writers, people who are gonna tell your story. but then you can also build a list of their email addresses. So you're gonna slowly be building that list up for a launch or with, or in a month from now, I'm gonna have this new press release about a new partner or a new feature we're launching. So you're gonna be able to do all that stuff. All right. So you're gonna be able to use social media also to build that list. So we talked about scheduling, we talked about posting every day, discovering your hashtags. But then really diving in and becoming obsessed with all of the niche social media related to your customers, the hashtags, the groups, the Facebook pages, the LinkedIn groups, all of that stuff is going to make you famous to regular customers and users and people who are monitoring those hashtags, and also some of the press. So if you do this for 90 days, I guarantee you, you will become an expert more than you ever were on your industry, but you're also gonna start to get some opportunities to be considered an expert and speak to the media. As you're reaching out to those reporters and you're giving them your PR or you're offering to speak or you're offering to be a source for them, eventually you're gonna start speaking to media. So if I had time left over, I just wanted to talk you through some really quick things, not really related to social media, but these are things that people screw up with all the time with talking to the media. And one of my goals for you with social media is to get these opportunities. Do not say, "Um," or, "I don't know." I'm imagining right now you're asking me something I don't know. Here's how I answer. "That's a really great question. You know, I don't think anybody's asked me that before. I'm gonna need to check with my team. I'd love to send you a response afterwards." That is different than, "I don't know." I wanna come off as an expert and I don't want this person to not source, use me as a source because I didn't know something, okay? So I'm skipping saying, "Um," or, "I don't know." Talk slowly, not like me, so that they can take notes. A lot of times those conversations with the media are not recorded, so you need to talk slow and give them like, you know, short answers that are only about 30 seconds. A lot of times, especially when I get founders in like really big publications, nationwide, global things like GQ, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, Forbes, um, those really scare founders, and so they try to give everything in one answer. You know, how did you start your startup? And then 5 minutes later, you've answered all their questions. Don't do that. Then the last thing, which is probably the most important, is do not, do not say anything about your startup you don't want your competitors, your grandma, everyone in the world to know about. There is no such thing as off the record, so be really careful about that. And I think that's pretty much everything I really wanted to tell you. I wanted to plant seeds. So that you have time for questions. But pulling it all together, posting regularly is important, but your follower count is not. You're not looking at those things as actual metrics for growing your business. If you wanna build a community, which is important, it's gonna take a lot of time and a lot of money, and it's not gonna grow your business right away. Usually while we're doing product development, we'll start to grow a community knowing that we'll leverage that later on. But if your business is live, Growing a community very slowly but surely without a budget is not going to move the needle for you most of the time. There's some extreme examples, so don't rip my head off if you— if it's working really well for you. But the majority of the time, the goal for you should be to just schedule those posts, be posting regularly to show Google and people that your business is active, and then spend more of the time going off of your own pages to really become obsessed with everyone else who's already talking about your your business on social. I didn't even talk about, when I showed that image collage, even going on YouTube, searching for the keywords that you would like to come up for, for your business, what are the videos that come up first on there? Going and commenting on those videos with a link to your business, your app, your startup, whatever, is an unbelievable strategy to test. If you do that 50 times organically and authentically, not just spamming those videos like, This is an awesome video I think you should also check out, or something that's valuable and relevant. You'll be able to see in those analytics if it's working. So then you do it more. If it's not working, don't do it, obviously, you know, but test everything, be data-driven, track it. And at the bottom line, you guys, everything should be about creating value. That's why you're starting this business. If your business isn't designed to help people, then you're working on the wrong startup. And the same thing should go for your social media. If you're spending time posting stuff that's not gonna be valuable to the people you're trying to convert, then you're wasting your time. So that is my talk for you today. I think we've got some questions, I'm sure we do. Let's kick it off. I'm gonna scroll all the way back up, or does somebody else want to? So I just put in the chat, so my name is Andrew Lee Miller, I'm also known as Andrew Startups. I have a book called The Startup Growth Book, which would teach you how to hack your social media, your PR, your SEO, your app store optimization, all with $0 investment so that you can get the traction you need to go raise money and then be able to grow your startup for real once you have that budget, right? The organic stuff is amazing, but, um, it's about going from 0 to 10 and then from 10 to 100 after that, right? You can use these strategies to grow your business for free. That's what I've I spent the last 15 years of my career on. Let's see these questions here. Question for Andrew. Oh, Eihan, you gonna handle the questions?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Thanks, Andrew. First of all, this has been amazing. You burned through that pretty fast, but you told me to go fast. Everyone, please show Andrew some love. Let's kind of get things going. Let's get these questions going. We have about— let's try to do 5 of these questions. So please head over to the Q&A tab. Upvoted. We'll start with the top one.

Sure.

So, can't see. So Alvaro's saying, after talking to 3 community managers, they told me that Twitter and TikTok are the easiest way to grow organically without paid ads. What's your feedback on this?

So it depends. Those people are people who are definitely leaning on video. So TikTok is all about video. You know, yes, you can grow organically, but you know, I need to know more about your business. But my opinion, If you have, you know, really easy access to being able to create great video content, then yes, you should be testing doing that on TikTok. You know, the whole point of my talk is, you know, yes, you can grow an organic following. It's gonna take you a long time. Even if it takes 60 days, I would rather you be spending off-page social media time finding those reporters, those speaking events, those partners, those PR opportunities, in those 60 days and then just scheduling that content first on your TikTok so that you can figure out, oh, this is the type of content that's gonna really resonate, and then you can start to create that more. So I'm not arguing that those two channels aren't great. I'm just saying that one thing I see founders do so often is nothing else but focusing on growing their social media, and then that doesn't pay dividends very quickly. It takes a long time to do so. So Yes, I do think that TikTok still is a blue ocean and you can still grow it really well, but I don't do anything on TikTok at all myself because I focus on driving leads through LinkedIn and through Twitter because they're B2B. That's where I can find more startup founders. If I was focused on low-ticket sales and really just trying to sell my book and not my consulting and coaching, then I would lean more into TikTok and really growing a tens and thousands of more social followers. So it really depends on what your goal is as a business, but I think you do need to do both. And so the point of my talk was to really get you to low-impact way to start posting, you know, a test to figure out, you know, it doesn't matter what other people say, right? Oh, this community manager grew their TikTok to 500,000. They don't know your industry or your target or your, your, your business and your customers as well as you do. So you still have to test it. So if you blanket post everywhere, very quickly in less than 30 days, you'll see, oh wow, our community, these communities are working for the KPIs that actually matter, meaning like in your app engagement KPIs or in your website conversion KPIs, you know what I mean? And so those things are gonna be the north star metrics that are gonna tell you if something's working or not.

Perfect. Sorry, and just also FYI, we went up to about 250 people at one point live. We're about to— Hey. Yeah, so—

Is that your record? That's your record?

I think, yeah, for these weekly, monthly, for these news, say TV.

Awesome.

Not TV, but these new weekly ones, yeah. All right, let's go to the next popular one. Is there a rule of thumb to publish every day or does each industry have its own rhythm for social media? What would the minimum threshold or frequency of post be?

Awesome, awesome question. When I'm working with B2B startups, I usually just like, let's keep it light. Let's do Monday, Wednesday, Friday to get started. You know, I think if you're B2C, you can post 7 days a week. It really doesn't matter. A weekend is usually like lighter, wholehearted, not so conversion-focused content, but it's really what you have the stomach and the abilities for. If you post Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you're going to get 90% of the subconscious benefit of showing that you're active. And so those extra 2 or 4 days, if you can't really, you know, stretch, or it, let's say it took you more than a week to create that 30 days worth of content, I'll stretch it a little farther by only doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's not gonna be like, the more you post, the more that you can, you know, grow your audience faster, right? There are influencers that, and people who are growing like social media focused businesses that post 10 times a day to really, really own those. Those hashtags. So I think two things go into that decision. One, what do we have the resources to do? And two, what is the perceived benefit that we want to test for? Does posting X number of posts more per week get us this benefit? Let's test it for a little bit. But the bottom line is, I think at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday to just show that you're an active business and that you're legitimate and start sending those signals to Google and Apple that you're— you should be ranked higher.

No, that's great. So follow up to that is by Tahini. I hope I say that name correct. Is that, you know, how do you kind of get started with doing the 30 posts at the start of each month, which aren't spam or repetitive? I guess like, I know they're thinking of this as you're here in a niche space, like how do you constantly create content around that space without kind of being a dead horse per se?

Yeah, so I, you know, breezed over it pretty quickly. You might have missed it, but there's a whole section in the book about creating a strategy. So that's why we start a Google Doc. What is our strategy going to be? I stick to, you know, 5 to 6 things and give them a percentage breakdown. 25% of time we're going to talk about the features, 20% of time we're going to talk about stats related to the problem that we're solving, another 20% of time I'm going to highlight user-generated content from our early customers and testimonials and feedback. All of these things move, make way into your strategy And then underneath each of those is the content idea. So, you know, user-generated content could be 5 different things that I just rattled off. So there's testimonials, there's a case study, there's, you know, a quote block of a testimonial, there's a video testimonial. So you can think of all those. By the time you finish that, you have 25 or so ideas of what to post every month. And so you kind of use it as a checklist when you're making that first 30 days worth of content. All right, I'm gonna do 2 of these, 2 of these, I already finished, I need 1 more of these. And then that can help you quickly go out, I'm gonna reach out to this customer and ask them for a video, I didn't get one of the videos yet. So that's kind of how I create that swath of content. And then we're throwing it up on a scheduling tool with the hashtags and et cetera. And then subsequent months, we're getting better at realizing what is actually driving the engagement. So nobody engaged with that user-generated content, we're not going to use that anymore. They really love the quote blocks. So I'm going to then go to Fiverr and I'm going to hire a designer and make 500 different quote blocks about the problem and schedule it and then just forget about it. And really that's what's— and then eventually you can even spend money on promoting that content once you really know that it drives the deeper conversion metrics that I was talking about. So that's kind of how you can do that.

No, I like that methodology of how you're connecting all these different pieces. I think some founders Some may understand it, some won't, because you're connecting your social media scheduling, your content production side, and all that. I think that's sound advice you've given. Okay, we're going to do one more question just to be respectful of everyone's time, then we're going to break out into tables. I really like this question, so I'm going to be a little bit biased, but like, you know, thanks Andrew. If our social media conversion data is all over the place, how should we figure out what works and what doesn't?

Um, so you say that one again? Sorry, I was marketing myself in the chat. Yeah, our social media conversion data is all over the place. How should we figure out what works so we can hone in on what's working? I mean, I'm not really sure what you mean by all over the place, but this is what I was saying. So if you have one analytics tool, then you're going to have to trust that tool. And if it's a free tool, it's probably giving you sample data that's not super accurate. So I try to have two data sources so I can compare and get the delta between them. So that's one thing. Two, you have to have a guiding light, a North Star metric, Will. So what is the actual thing I wanna see in social media happen for this business? If you are B2B, it's probably gonna be leads. And I wanna see how many meetings are coming from social media. How many interested potential customers am I getting from social media? So if I'm doing all of this stuff throughout the month, And at the end of the month, Will, I'm looking at, oh wow, we got 2 meetings from Twitter, 1 from YouTube, and 8 from LinkedIn. We should probably focus on just those 3 channels and really spend our off-page time focused on those channels, really growing the community. And if we have a budget, even spending money on LinkedIn because we saw 8 leads already come. Maybe leads and then eventually sales. You wanna track sales. So if you're B2C, Then you're looking at, you know, let's say your mobile app, you're looking at where are the installs coming from, right? You might not be able to get that deep of data, depends on what tracking tools that you're using. But if you see, if you can't get install data, then it's, you know, you know, you can get qualitative data by asking users in the app where they found out about you from. And if you get a lot of feedback once they're in the app that they found out about you from, a certain social media, then that's how you'll really follow up. So you can, you know, there's more than just digital analytics. You can get qualitative analytics, speaking to your customers, finding out what they like and don't like about your business or where they found out about you. And that can also inform your social media strategy.

Okay, perfect. Andrew, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I'm sure everyone's had a blast. You know, we saw about 200+ people here live.

Nice.

Folks, what we're gonna do is we're gonna break out into tables. Hopefully, Andrew, you can get to your table. You can answer a few more questions. I obviously appreciate you taking the time. Of course. I hope everyone found this very valuable. Please show Andrew some love, buy his book, follow him on social.

Startupgrowthbook.com and on Amazon. Yeah, we'll— Like I said, if you see it not on Amazon, there's Kindle and there's the hard copy book and there's the audiobook on Audible. If you see it's not in your country, let— send me a message. On Instagram or LinkedIn. I'm AndrewStartups on.com, everything. I'll send you a free copy of the book and then I will rip Amazon apart because of your help.

Awesome. Well, everyone, thanks so much for sticking around. Hopefully you can stay a little bit longer. We're coming to about 55 minutes. Again, this event recording will be sent out about 48 hours. We're going to upload it to YouTube. Then you guys can— I think there's a lot of content that was covered, so make sure you kind of go and review it because Andrew is dropping gold here. I'm going to end the session now. You kind of see all these tables and then we'll kind of go from there. Thank you everyone. Hope you have a great Monday and then we'll see you next Monday.

Take care.