Why every startup needs to hire a social media manager
On the advantages of telling your own stories, and the power of social media
Some time ago, prominent technology executive Pravin Jadhav wrote this on Twitter:
No, this is not about Accel, where I work.
It’s about the companies Jadhav points out, trailblazers in India’s startup ecosystem, and what they understood before anyone else did.
First, Flipkart.
In 2015, Flipkart was getting a few negative stories in the press.
Whether that was deserved or undeserved is not the subject of this piece. But how Flipkart chose to respond is. In September that year, they launched Flipkart Stories, a portal of their own. The press was not telling the stories they wanted told. So they did it themselves.
Flipkart Stories became a hybrid place where the company talked itself up, launched employer branding campaigns, announced new initiatives, and so on. They simply sidestepped the media.
It was very evident, at least to a marketer, what Flipkart was doing. And it was genius.
Flipkart Stories morphed into something completely different later, but it was great while it lasted. I’ll always remember it as a great flanking move: If you won’t tell our stories, we’ll tell them ourselves.
Now, Freshworks.
In 2013, Freshworks hired a brilliant young tech blogger named Shankar Ganesh. He was going to lead PR for us.
Not an agency, not some experienced executive. A fresh graduate.
And he was amazing at it.
He delivered campaigns and news placements and a lot of buzz without having any experience at all. His blogging experience and taste told him what would work and what wouldn’t, and he designed our creatives and campaigns to make the kind of noise we wanted. We almost never needed to push our stories in the old way, the media wanted to tell them.
All of this was also, of course, Girish’s genius at picking talent (we’ll get to that later). But Shankar exceeded all our expectations.
He moved to product management in time, and was an ace at that too, eventually moving to Plum this last year.
Both these initiatives by Flipkart and Freshworks were attempts to shape public opinion and make sure their story was told. One did it by creating its own space to tell them, the other did it by hiring talent that understood how to sell them.
In the years since, the reach and importance of social media has gone up exponentially. This is a world in which Elon Musk can move stock prices up and down by tweeting, and obscure subreddits can take on the world’s largest hedge funds.
Startups are realising the scale of what is possible: Why do you need PR if you have Twitter and you can use your own followers, who have chosen to follow you, to amplify your reach? Why do you need to write a blog when you can make a video and share on LinkedIn, where your target audience, which follows you already, can see it immediately?
You can see this at play with the popular Indian consumer brands of our time. Zomato is excellent at this, so is Netflix. Amul has long been a fan favourite, and niche brands like March Tee, who I’ve referenced before, are also getting in on the act.
B2B is late to this, as usual, but a few founders and companies aren’t. Cred’s Kunal Shah is a good example, so is Freshworks itself, which now has a dedicated social media team.
I’ve written before about how founders should be building a brand and an audience for themselves. This is an extension of that argument, but with an action item.
When you are small and have no real marketing budget, social media can be a way to reach out to your target audience, tell them a story, and build brand recall. And you can do all of this without the original gatekeepers: the newspapers, the business publications, and the tech blogs who don’t see you as important enough and will not give you the space you need to tell your story.
So do what Flipkart and Freshworks did: Build a space where you can tell your own story, and hire someone who understands how to tell it.
And give this person, your social media manager, two things: clarity and freedom. Clarity in what your brand is and wants to be, and freedom to be creative and create content that is different, that pushes the boundaries.
Because if you do what everyone else is doing, nothing will happen.
But the upside to actually be different, have a voice, and have something to say, is infinite. You can build an audience for your product, establish your thought leadership on a topic, and can launch and run campaigns without needing any sort of PR support.
This brings us to the most important point: Hire the best talent. But not just the best talent, the best talent at what you want done. Girish wanted someone who understood the world of tech blogs, so he hired a tech blogger. Want to create a Twitter following for your startup? Then find someone who is already doing something like that for themselves and tap them.
Just don’t treat social as an afterthought, or as an appendage of the content team.
Remember that it will be the first touchpoint many prospects/customers will have with your brand. You want to capture mindshare and recall then and there, and you need your social media to do this for you.
Doing this well is a full time job. Give it the respect it deserves.