Regardless of how great a startup idea may be, almost every startup struggles to find their first few users. Gaining traction is often a struggle, and many entrepreneurs fail to anticipate how much self-promotion is required to generate attention. In the post below, Anshuman Bapna explains that customer acquisition can be easy when correctly leveraging the social media platform Twitter.
Anshuman Bapna is a serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of the travel planning service Mygola. Previously, he was the co-founder of RightHalf.com, which was acquired while Bapna was an undergraduate student. In the article below, Bapna shares the invaluable startup marketing tips and lessons he gained from years of building and growing technology companies.
This post was written by Anshuman Bapna - CEO of Mygola and mentor of the Bangalore Founder Institute.
If you are relevant, you’re golden. And what’s more relevant than responding to a call for help?" - Anshuman Bapna
Anshuman Bapna is a mentor for the upcoming Spring 2016 semester at the Bangalore Founder Institute, which is currently accepting applications. If you or someone you know could benefit from expert startup tips and training in Bangalore, then register for the upcoming free Founder Institute Online Graduate Panel.
At Mygola, we’ve struggled with how to use social media smartly. Why does it matter how many followers you have on twitter or fans on Facebook? I can see why a business would like a gazillion followers (spam ’em!) but what’s in it for your follower & your fan? And if that dynamic is not true, what’s the point?
Since we like to think things through first principle, we picked Twitter & tried a bunch of things. Here’s what worked for us, ymmv.
So What's Twitter Good For?
One-on-one communication. NOT broadcast.
Twitter may sound, smell & walk like a broadcast medium. And maybe it is. For Coca-Cola. But for a startup, it just ain’t that duck. Why spend that extra minute crafting the right tweet for an unknown audience with questionable attention when you can bang out a few more lines of code?
For medium-sized / well-hyped companies, Twitter may serve as a better tool for customer service (another example of one-to-one communication). But for the starving startup, there’s only one hard fact that should convince them to invest the time – it gets them new customers.
Why Should Customer Acquisition Work Well on Twitter?
Here’s my theory: the majority of people of twitter follow less than a dozen people. An @mention gets their attention, perhaps the way an email would have in, umm, 1993. If you abuse this attention, you go to spam hell. But if you are relevant, you’re golden. And what’s more relevant than responding to a call for help?
As it turns out, twitter users are asking for help every minute, every second.
Now imagine you’re one of the folks in the image above. If you have just a few dozen followers, and a feed that’s always moving, guess what happens? Your request for help echoes emptily in the twitterverse before dying a quick death, hashtag notwithstanding. That’s what we realized early on when we saw a huge number of people asking for suggestions for trips they were taking – restaurants, things to do, hotels etc. We started responding to them (always manually, see spam hell above) and were happily surprised to see how big the uptake was. The tweeters loved the convenience & direct connection, and happily retweeted their love for us after seeing how high-quality our answers were. See all the love we get here!
In fact, it worked so well that we now acquire almost half of our users through twitter. Yes, half.
I agree that Twitter is not a massively scalable channel. But for comparison sakes, cost of acquisition in travel can range anywhere from $5-50, so this is a solid return on the effort (in addition to the benefit of getting the word out there about your startup). Obviously, we’re not the first ones to realize this. I’ve lately seen Inboxq & another hotel-focused tool come up that offer this as a service to anyone.
Tips on How to Make Twitter Customer Acquisition Work for You
- Don’t automate. Rather, automate only the discovery part, not the actual tweet & responses
- Don’t try to push the conversation to your website. Twitter is the natural place for it, so keep it there as long as it makes sense
- Eventually, write your own tool. We discovered a bunch of thumb rules that worked for us – ignore any user who has a link in their tweet (they’re companies, not people!); use follower / follows / tweet numbers in combination with what they say in their bios to rank influence & so on. Since Twitter search sucks only a little less than LinkedIn’s, we wrote our own tool to accommodate these.
- Ask to be retweeted. Remember, ask & ye shall be given
Let me know in comments if you have some pro tips for us. In fact, we struggle mightily with what’s the authentic thing to do on facebook, so please share your awesome ideas on what worked for you.
If you want even more expert startup advice, the Bangalore Founder Institute is currently accepting applications. Apply today!
If you or someone you know could benefit from expert startup tips and training in Bangalore, then register for the upcoming free Founder Institute Online Graduate Panel.
