Is social media worth doing for an early Saas startup?
The answer will shock you: "Kinda, actually."
Assuming your company is officially in launch mode, social media can actually be a really important tool for getting new users—just not always directly.
They say it takes X touches to make a sale, and X usually varies from 8 to 16 in sane conversations. Touches include phone calls, emails, LinkedIn DMs, etc., but that’s for people who are already in your pipeline or on your radar.
Here’s a concept I’ve been wrestling for a while.
Marketing probably takes something like 60-200 “touches” before someone even voluntarily enters your sales funnel, but the “touches” themselves are something like subliminal and hypnotic thought patterns that gravitationally pull someone in your direction.
👉 Prospect > 16 touches > deal outcome
👉 Stranger > ~200 “marketing touches” > prospect
Whoa, that sounds crazy; bear with me.
Here are some example “touches” that might subconsciously hypnotize you in one direction or another:
Simply hearing a company name spoken aloud
Observing a friend liking Duolingo’s post on Instagram
My friend Pierre calling me a “Pillsbury dough boy” instead of just a regular dough boy (stop poking me bro I’m violent)
Your boss humming to the tune of the J.G Wentworth (877 cash now!) advertisement song
Starbucks coffee on the table in that episode of Game of Thrones
The Polo logo on your colleague’s shirt
Thinking about how “Raytheon” sounds like a Pokemon
According to my logic, the above list is something like a miniature advertisement for the aforementioned brands. If you’re anything like me, you’re still kind of thinking about the word “Raytheon.”
Social media = marketing touchpoints
This same principle applies to social media. You’re not gonna get someone emailing you a screenshot of your post, saying “Wow, this sounds so compelling, sign me up!” but it’s another psychic tentacle herding potential users in your direction.
Related: Read my friend Skye’s insights on trying to measure the ROI of a billboard.
From experience, I’ve met a lot of founders who have discovered—over the course of years—that LinkedIn (for instance) is a way that potential customers keep index of your company.
Maybe right now they’re interested in your potential as a founder. Maybe they think your Saas is a good idea in theory. Maybe they want to wait until they can get some social proof before actually vetting you. Whatever the reason, they’ll follow you.
Which social media platforms to use
⚠️ This is going to vary dramatically depending on your business and, most importantly, your target audience.
While it’s virtually impossible to try to rank the importance of social media platforms in order of importance, I’m going to do it anyway based solely on my own experience as an early-stage Saas marketer.
LinkedIn
Almost everyone on LinkedIn is a serious person. Their real name and real occupation are included.
Company posts are very welcome and well-received on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn deliberately makes it easy to leverage connection to get to decision-makers.
LinkedIn advertising isn’t that much worse than Meta advertising anymore.
Twitter / X
Twitter is where hobbyists and perpetually online people hang out, whether they hate Elon Musk or not.
A lot of B2C Saas companies have success using Twitter / X as an additional line of communication for things like product updates and even support.
Instagram
Great spot for B2C Saas companies with a well-refined brand and/or assets.
Requires a bit of upfront expenses: Without attractive ads created by a real designer, it’s hard to get attention.
Users aren’t as friendly towards brand posts as other companies.
Facebook
Kids and tech users aren’t as active on Facebook as they are on other apps, but Facebook targeting makes advertising very easy.
It’s pretty easy to copy over all your IG content to Facebook.
Facebook is fine if you don’t mind your dad commenting, “Way to go!” on all your company posts.
What type of content should I post?
It’s probably going to be a while before you have a full-time social media employee in-seat. Even your first few marketers are likely going to want to do more impactful stuff and ignore social media.
In lieu of evolving a robust brand voice, social media cadence, and using a tool like Agorapulse to aggregate your social media interactions, you should start by posting the following content types:
Blog posts (and any website content)
Especially when you’re starting, content is going to be sparse. Consider everything you create or publish to also be social media content. This is essentially what your first dedicated social media marketer will do, except they’ll be way better at it.
Here’s what that flow should look like:
Publish anything on your website or blog
Break that thing into 3-5 individual social media posts, varying in length for what platforms allow
Note: ChatGPT is actually really good at this. A trained model can do step 2 for you.
Post each piece on social media with a link back to the original article/content.
Bonus step: Start worrying about open graph images
Product updates
Product updates might not get a lot of engagement or even drive a lot of signal back to your website, but they’re important.
Like we mentioned before, people are going to lurk your page—too scared to drop a “like” and get targeted for a demo, but interested enough to check on your progress.
As you grow, your users will begin to expect product updates from your company’s social media page. This is also another reason for users to follow you on social media in the first place.
It’s like an infinity symbol but in real life! 🤦♂️
Behind-the-scenes stuff and company culture
The famous Ben Goldstein once told me something along the lines of:
The best content isn’t about your profession; that’s too boring.
The best content isn’t about you; that’s not attractive enough.
The best content is the intersection of where you and your profession collide.
The same is true for your company. Saas messaging, especially if it’s B2B, is going to be pretty dry and boring. One way to mix that up and create some serious user affinity is to show your human side.
The only way to actually make a sale is to become a trusted advisor, and the best way to become a trusted advisor is to show your human side.
Is it worthwhile for me to spend money on social media ads?
Yeah, but not necessarily for lead generation.
Social media advertising is a pretty low-effort way to gain clicks, website pageviews, and maybe even some conversions, but it’s also pretty low-reward.
For one, your ads will need to be pretty good and refined in order to see promising growth. And while it is worth it to develop and polish some ads that can be used on social media, your primary goal should be experimenting.
Using social media ads to test messaging and targeting
Imagine you can’t decide whether to describe your product offering as “feature flags” or “feature gates.” You wish you could simply ask your target audience what they call them.
Brilliant opportunity to A/B test some ads.
☝️ Yeah, we really learned from this experiment at Statsig.
Your best-case scenario after running such an ad is that you score some users, but your worst-case scenario is that you now understand which messaging is more compelling for a given audience.
The other thing that makes social media advertising great is the granularity its advertising offers. And even if your targeting isn’t perfect, platforms will automatically show your ads to more interactive users like a big ongoing multi-armed bandit experiment.
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Thanks for reading!
I hope this is helpful advice for the scrappers out there doing it themselves. If you liked what you’ve read, please consider subscribing or leaving a comment—I use them for signal on what’s working and what’s not.