Social Acquistion – Your Best First Growth Channel

So you’ve got a great new product or service, but what now?

Everyone is giving you conflicting info:

• Paid definitely – great testing ground, but terrible if you’re still figuring it out, since it requires you to pony up some $. Steep learning curve here too
• Facebook/ Twitter – same as above but sometimes worst because of the shares and retweets if you say something wrong or piss the wrong person off
• Content marketing – takes weeks, months to write enough posts, videos, and ebooks to be taken seriously
• Email – but you don’t even have any

And the list goes on and on.

Ideally, you would have multiple channels working simultaneously, but something with immediate return and what drove affiliate at my current startup was Social Acquisition.

No, not just paid Facebook and Twitter ads, but Social Acquistion – anything that builds and maintains relationships to improve the traditional customer acquisition and retention processes, as well as puts an emphasis on building and monetizing relationships

Here’s some examples:

1. Community Forums – my personal favorite
   1. This Neil Patel post on Quicksprout actually talks about backlinks , but it’s the exact same idea. Sign up for google alerts for whatever keyword or product you are targeting, find community forums, roll up your sleeves, and dig in. Engage with users, ask them questions and answer theirs about the product
2. Twitter Eavesdropping
   1. Use Mention, BuzzSumo or whatever your favorite tool is for monitoring social keywords. You can even use twitter and save your search history, and start replying, favoriting, building lists of users and finding people who are interested or might be interested in our product
3. Facebook
   1. A little harder but if you start buying Facebook media, start the comments section by announcing that you are here to help and answer questions. This will get the convo going
4. Blog Comments
   1. Use Google to search trending news posts of there’s similar products or things that might tie in well with your product or service. Then see if there’s any active blog commenter and start engaging with them. Usually, they are the worst criticizers, but if you can connect and sell them, you can do it on anyone.
   2. If you get any PR, be sure to monitor the comment sections of any pub that writes about you.

Ideally, this will help you learn your sales process and improve marketing language. You’ll also uncover some great new channels like Affiliate and can improve your conversation rates on any Paid Twitter/ Facebook ads you’ll run. If someone knows you’re there and willinng to help then any last reservation they have can be easily overcome.

Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin or Twitter or learn more about me here.

Also here’s some useful Marketing Tools if you’re interested

Thanks!