A startup business should always analyse or review your social media channels.  It is very easy for a business to get caught up in the data that is available to them on these social media channels.  If your business has set some social media goals (which you should do), then you should be able to use the analytic data from your social media channel and compare them to the goals you have set.  This will enable any business to determine if they are on the right course to meet their objectives or if they need to alter the plan.  We decided to analyse our first 8 weeks on Twitter.

When we first started out on Twitter, we only had a couple of followers.  We had no logo, bio, cover image and weren’t posting regularly.  The image below is what Twitter Analytics showed us after week one. 

Here is what it looks like after 8 weeks.  As you can see there is a growth in new followers, tweet impressions, tweets and profile visits.

After analysing Twitter’s data, we recommend the following strategy to start growing your followers:

• Post regularly
• Use hashtags that relate to your industry and business
• Provide information or articles that can help solve other businesses or people’s problems
• Use Tweriod to analyse the best times for you to tweet (we did this on week 7)
• Retweet other businesses or people’s tweets
• Use images or photos in your tweets – a must as people are consuming visual content now
• Engage and respond to tweets directed to you promptly

There are some tactics that we are yet to apply, such as:

• Targeting a list of followers to help promote your business i.e. influencers or industry experts
• Say thanks and mention business or people
• Cross promote content from other social media channels or blog articles

There are so many tactics that can be used to grow your followers in your startup business.  Do you use any of these tactics?  What tactics do you recommend using to grow followers? Do you find any of these tactics helpful?