StartUp Life: Let social media do your marketing

If you are an entrepreneur in this highly competitive world, you have no doubt thought about how to market your business effectively, with the least cost. While on an average, companies spend around 10% of their revenue on marketing (squarespace), entrepreneurs are also discovering the power of Social media marketing, which  a very useful and effective tool to reach out to a large number of people, whether customers or stakeholders.  To make things simpler, ShethePeople.TV catches up with social media and content marketing aficionado Unmana, who shares some valuable advice on how to effectively harness the power of social media to benefit business.

So just how effective is social media marketing?

If you are the entrepreneur, social media is the cheapest marketing platform out there, because it is essentially free. You don’t have to spend anything you don’t want to. What you need is something original, useful that you want to say. As an entrepreneur you know your business, you know your customers; you know what kind of content you are looking for. The content format doesn’t matter. You could do photos with a line of text, blog posts, and videos- all of that works. You need to figure out what works for you and what’s the best medium for the content that you have to say. Put it up in a place where your customers are likely to find you and read.

Social media is a great promotional tool for business: Unmama

But there are so many people wanting to say the same things. How can I be more appealing?

Put yourself out there and make an emotional connection with your customers, your prospects, then go ahead - that works really well. But if it’s not comfortable for you or it’s not how you naturally work, then don’t try or push it. Do something that works with your personality; something that you or your marketing person (if you have one), find easier to do.

Also read: How to stand out on social media as an upcoming entrepreneur

But as a woman entrepreneur, we run at a higher risk of being victims to sexism. What about that?

I think cyber sexism is another form of regular old school sexism which is mostly derived from the fact that women are not seen as people. If you disagree with a man, you attack the argument; If you disagree with a woman, you attack her personally. This is something that happens offline; it happens much more online because you are more anonymous and you are not even pretending to be polite. I have had cases where there are people I am very friendly with in real life, but who are really rude to me online. I do think that women face this much more and I do think it is much more likely for people to devolve to really personal attacks, call you a bitch and all when it is online. I used to blog very actively about my personal life and I slowed down because not that I faced a lot of abuse, but even the little bit that I was facing; I did not want to deal with it. So I moved on to blogging about less personal topics. The good thing is that there is more awareness about it, so we are fighting it. There are lot of feminists online who are sharing and mocking at such incidents, which I feel is a very positive development.

Also read: How to handle cyber sexism? Stand up to it!

Commenting on the changing tools of social media and feminism in the cyber space, Unmana explains how it is equally beneficial for personal growth with this anecdotal example:

When I was younger, I felt very isolated because I was a feminist and I did not have any feminist friends. Blogging is what rescued me. Blogging got me in touch with other feminists. At that time, which was 9-10 years, we had a very active Indian feminist bloggers network. They might not all be blogging about feminism all the time. Some of them were mommy bloggers, most of us were just personal bloggers. Though feminism was a big part of our lives. And this whole platform helped us find each other; discuss and argue with each other and make friends, and that was really important for me. Since then, I think blogging has somewhat died down a bit and focus has shifted on other forms of social media. Now there are Facebook and Whatsapp groups, and there is twitter. I think there are a lot of really great conversations happening on twitter. It’s a great place where as a young feminist who is trying to find out what feminism means to you and connect with other feminists. I think all of these are really great ways.

So there you have it ladies. Use the social media platform, even if you run the risk of attacks in the form of cyber sexism. It's the most cos-effective way to get your message across!