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13 Comments

Do you have social media dedicated to your product?

Hey Indie Hackers,

Do you think having a social media account is important for your product? I am trying to increase the number of followers on my Instagram account. What can I do to reach more people?

Here is my products Insta: https://www.instagram.com/swiftpandastudio/

If

  1. 3

    I think it depends on the audience you're going for. My site is aimed at gamers, and many of them use social media heavily. I try to post on Twitter at least once a day, and follow and like any relevant accounts I see on there.

    In my first month, 570 of the sessions on my site were attributed to Twitter. That's no small number for me, so it's been worth it.

    1. 1

      That is awesome! I was searching for this answer actually. Thank you.

  2. 2

    I don't even have social media for myself. I believe that the gain usually comes when you start doing things that few people do. I spend the 2-3-4 hours people use on their social media for doing things that move the needle. Don't get me wrong for some companies and persons they are incredibly useful, but they are less than 1%, the other 99% waste time hoping to get the results of this 1%.

    1. 1

      That is a good point but successful people mostly have social media accounts and most of them say "I spend this much time in a day at social media". Do you think they are having those accounts because they are in this %1? Or are they using social media to be aware of the things around them? I am curious about the social media effect on businesses.

      1. 1

        It's hard to answer if you don't define the term "successful". What do you mean exactly?

        1. Celebrities, like actors, athletes, singers? They obviously do a lot of money because people follow them, they have no incentives saying that the average person has nothing to gain being on social media.
        2. Marketing and entrepreneurship "gurus"? People that have successful blogs and sell courses? They need an audience to monetize, maybe even more than celebrities.
        3. Entrepreneurs like Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg? In that case, they spend very little time on social media and I suppose that they delegate all the operations, like content creation, to somebody else.

        Don't get me wrong, for a company social can help a lot, but not when you are just starting out. When you are just beginning is better to use startup directories and communities, sites like Reddit and Quora, paid ads on social media, cold emailing, manually reaching users and most important of all having amazing product and customer service to incentivize word of mouth.

        If you want to use social media, you better spend that time to build a personal brand. It is easier and can always help you. Imagine that in the next few months you get bored with your project or you see that you don't make any money and you want to change. You have wasted months to build an audience that could be irrelevant for your next idea.

  3. 2

    I spun up a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account for Send That Invoice. Way too premature on that front. Now I have to maintain those accounts... or abandon them. Too much effort for too little reward, when I need to focus on my product features.

    Besides... invoicing isn’t a topic that lends itself to social media.

    Also, I’m a cranky old man. Perhaps somebody with more gumption to make social media work for invoicing could make it work. But it’s not how I want to spend my energy.

    Anyway...
    https://www.twitter.com/SendThatInvoice

    1. 2

      I think you are right on the part where you can focus on the project instead of doing social media.

      From my point of view, I make games and somehow I need to interact with gamers, game developers, etc. I was thinking separating some time on social media could help me do that. Well at least I followed you and I will be checking updates on SendThatInvoice. I guess that is a win for a cranky old man. :)

      Good luck with your project.

  4. 2

    yes. careermove.io has a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/careermoveio

    Nice Instagram profile anyway. I just followed you 👍

    1. 1

      Thank you!

      Career Move is interesting.

      Followed you back.
      Cheers.

  5. 2

    Also, share your social media so we can connect. :D

  6. 1

    Yes it will help your company to have profiles on lots of different websites. If you want more control over the keywords that you show up for when searched, create your own domain.

  7. 1

    I too started with social media and I think it takes away a lot of time from the main project. Especially for projects just starting out, it might be better to spend time blogging for SEO rather than social media, if you want to build traction. This has been my experience though, different ideas have different needs.

  8. 1

    Instagram - The key is engagement. Following other accounts, posting genuine comments etc ...

    Twitter - Key is giving someone a reason to follow your account. There's a bunch of examples of this:

    Five ideas a day - You know what you're getting
    Marketing Examples - You know what you're getting
    Naval Ravikant Bot - You know what you're getting

    It's hard to build a company twitter without having a reputation for something. If you just tweet pictures of your office plants it's going to be tough. For example people follow Paddy Power because they know the whole account is just sport jokes ... If they started tweeting too much about betting prices it wouldn't work ...

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