Social media for anti social(media) founders.

Namaste good people! As promised, I'm back with a practical guide to social media for early stage brands.

This will work best for single category brands (think D2C) but should work for any business that sells to end consumers. Just one caveat. You need to have some customers who adore you. If you're at absolute zero, find your first 50 or 100 diehard fans and then come back to this. Let's start with the basics.

Why do social media at all?

To attract people who are most likely to buy your product.

Who is most likely to buy your product?

People similar to your happiest existing customers.

As you grow, obviously this focus is going to diminish. You'll cast a wider and wider net because your brand fanatics will get dwarfed by your overall customer group. This happens to every brand, but it is worthwhile to start with a core of followers who adore your product.

Think of the people who camp overnight outside Apple stores to spend their life savings on a mildly improved phone

If you build something of real value, you will find customers like these. If you're lucky you'll find many. The ones who will send you emails at midnight complaining about your new product being out of stock or defend you in the comments section when someone trashes your brand.

At the risk of sounding oversimplistic:

Find a mini-influencer among your happiest customers and offer them a job.

Coming to the specifics. At first, find a customer who is a mini-influencer with around 5-15k followers (I'm using Instagram as an example). This person will be able to grow your handle upto their own following in a couple of months. Then it's time to go talent hunting in a higher slab, say 30-40k followers. Repeat.

When you feel someone is starting to push against a ceiling, repeat this process. Generally speaking, aim for someone with the following size you want to have 4-6 months later.

A hypothetical example

In my previous post, I wrote in detail about our Instagram journey to 70k followers at Viviva. We hired our own customers to grow our handle and create our community. It worked like magic.

Here, let me take the liberty of looking at a brand I've quietly admired for some time - Vahdam Teas.

Disclaimer: Vahdam is NOT an early stage bootstrapped brand. They have an 80 year old legacy and have raised some $60m in funding. Karan Johar promotes them and they're in the Oscars goodie bag. They've made it, so by no stretch an early stage brand.

This example is purely hypothetical but illustrates my point well.

Imagine for second you're starting a brand like Vahdam Teas from scratch. All you have is a couple of products and a few hundred customers, some of whom love you more than their dog. From this POV, Vahdam becomes a good study because:

1. They have a neatly defined audience. From their website and social media, it seems to be upper middle class women aged 25-40. The ones who have both time and money to think about detox and other fine things in life.
2. They have passionate customers. Their users seem to love the teas. I expect Vahdam to have a high repeat order rate.

Take a look at one of the featured customers on their product page.

This could also be an influencer collaboration (I don't know) but let's assume this is an organic loyal customer.

I looked up Pallavi and found that she teaches and promotes Yoga, wellness and related products (amazon affiliate).

13k followers. Small enough to be highly relatable and yet clearly a thorough professional. Ideal sized influencer.

I would somehow convince her to run Instagram for me because she will speak to my audience better than I can.

I asked Pallavi's permission to post this, you can check out her work here .

A win-win for both brand and influencer

I used to think this approach was too good a deal for the brand. We could grow faster and with more relevant followers. All the while spending less than we would with an in-house social media team. Now I see this is a fantastic arrangement for the mini-influencers too.

You see, most influencers don't actually make that much money off their social media. And most brands don't bother to build good relationships - it's very transactional for most.

Source: Grin/ CROWD

Influencers above a certain threshold make decent money, but there's a long tail of very talented creators who don't get their worth.

Working with your brand helps them make additional income which is very welcome. In addition, their own account grows faster too! Lastly, in my experience, influencers love the opportunity to build a brand ground up. It's an entirely new experience of trust and ownership and helps them level up in their careers.

The final TL;DR

Have a brand with some very passionate customers? Find one passionate customer who is an influencer with 10-15k followers and hand over your account to them. Pay them for their time and let them grow the account as they see fit. Once they max out, find someone with 30-40k followers and repeat.

Pay them well, trust them, make friends with them and let them run loose. You will be far better off than trying to do social media in-house.

You made it to the end - congrats on your fantastic attention span

I write regularly about my adventures building businesses. Follow this newsletter if you liked it. If you didn't, tell me why.

Ameya