5 Social Media Strategies for Early-Stage Startup Founders

How to Think About Using Social Media as a Founder

It’s harder to promote your startup on social media channels than it used to be. Sure, it’s still free of charge to post to social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter/X, but publishers dramatically reduced organic reach of social channels years ago to “encourage” users to pay for promotion. Today, success on social media isn’t about hoping you “go viral.” It’s about these strategies:

• Starting From a Clear Goal: Thought leadership is different from generating leads, and requires a different approach
• [Eventually] Scaling Your Social Presence: While founders often start by focusing on a single channel, they often go multi-channel eventually, and post regularly
• Effectively Engaging: Successful social interactions are user-focused rather than transactional
• Bridging into Real-World Interaction: Where applicable, social can help you to build toward face-to-face meetings
• Preparing for Scrutiny at Scale: Everything posted online lasts forever!

To understand how founders should think about social media both in the short and long term, we sat down with social media veterans Carter Hostelley and Karri Carlson of the agency Leadtail, which has helped startups grow their social followings since 2012.

1. Set Goals: Building Reputation vs. Building Pipeline

• Strategy Before Numbers: There should be an ultimate goal behind the follower count or post shares. What’s yours?
• Choosing an Approach: Building in public, building niche reputation, or engaging with top influencers can work if you have a plan.

The Leadtail team understands the urgency of startup life, but suggests founders take a beat to consider their ultimate goals for social media. “If a founder tells us: ‘I need to get 5,000 followers on Twitter,’ we’ll say: ‘OK, but why?’ Are you looking to build a following so you can raise funding? Or to become popular? Or to get people to try your product so you can accelerate your learnings? Or to hire the smartest people out there?”

“Is your goal really to hit some number this quarter, or is it to build a brand over time? You can literally buy followers if you just want to play that game. But we recommend having a strategy behind your presence on whichever platform.”

As an example, the team discusses “Tech Twitter/X,” an active ecosystem for highly technical founders in arenas like AI and cybersecurity (on a platform that used to be much more active itself.) “On Twitter/X, where we’ve seen a few different ways to be successful.”

a. The Journey Sharer (and a Potential Self-Intro to Investors)

A common approach to Tech Twitter is treating it like a public journal, where founders candidly share their wins and losses (and their commitment to success for potential investors). “You share the process of building your product, as well as your challenges raising money, or hiring the right people, or what happened when the product crashed.”

“This approach can be part of a strategy on how to get funding. How to be seen as somebody in the community who investors want to know about. Because you're demonstrating that you are a responsible steward with their money and that you're able to build things successfully and you're able to hire successful people.”

b. The Thought Leader Following/Deciphering the Trends

“Another approach is to continuously share your thoughts and opinions around where things are going, while ideally having opinions that are not just the same thing everyone else is saying. The idea here is to be opinionated, but not too abrasive.” Leadtail admits that this approach can be challenging for engineering-focused founders who aren’t usually given to doling out hot takes.

“But you can still share your views on trending topics. And for those who aren’t as comfortable commenting publicly, the strategy is really to engage around the technical questions that are happening on other people's posts as they share what they’re seeing, and to do it in a highly productive way.”

“This is a bit of a different approach that focuses more on finding all the conversations about this thing about which I am knowledgeable. Every time someone encounters that topic, you want to be in the thread. That's how people are going to come to know you. Every time someone looks at a conversation that's about this corner of this universe, there you are. That's how you’re going to get known, and that's how people are going to become interested in who you are.”

c. The “Reply Guy”

“A third approach we’ve seen founders take, particularly for super-technical folks, is identifying a bunch of influencers talking about the technology space you’re in, and looking to build a following by replying to those influencers. The way to succeed here is to find a specific group of high-profile folks who are knee-deep in this stuff and actively engaging in discussions.”

“You’ll want to make that list of influencers you reply to be a manageable size (we recommend no more than 20-25 or so for starters), and look to engage with them regularly. You’re essentially monitoring them and looking for opportunities where it makes sense to dive in, but to do so in a way that is genuinely authentic and helpful.”

2. Scale Your Posting (and Channels)

• Choosing the Right Channel: Different channels have different strengths. Busy early-stage founders may want to start small
• Scaling Across Channels: Eventually, successful founders tend to adopt multiple platforms, including Twitter for direct engagement, LinkedIn for video, and blogging platforms for long-form analysis
• Posting 2-3+ Weekly: A cadence of 2-3 posts weekly isn’t a bad place to start, and can be a combination of prepared programming and commentary on ad hoc trending stories

Which Social Channel Is Right for My Startup?

The Leadtail team confirms that it makes sense for new founders to focus on a few social channels, or just one channel, in the earliest days. “Yes, the vast majority of folks are really anchoring around LinkedIn, but for certain areas, like AI and cybersecurity, especially for early-stage founders trying to engage with VC, Twitter/X is very active.”

However, the social media veterans suggest that successful founders generally end up spreading their presence across multiple channels for strategic reasons. “Many years ago, we’d talk about supplementing your social presence with a content presence on Medium.com. But it’s about considering how the combination of these things work: You update people on product status in one place versus having deeper industry commentary somewhere else.”

“And the general track is that founders start to see some success, raise their Series A or Series B, and at that point, it’s recommended they have a strong presence on LinkedIn, which can be a good home for video content. While their thought leadership sits on Substack. And their conversational updates, the direct engagement and meeting of community people, takes place on Twitter/X.”

How Often Should Startup Founders Post to Social Media?

“You may be pursuing a few of these scenarios regularly (except the reply guy scenario, as that will depend on your diving into conversations as they happen). If you’re sharing your journey or pursuing thought leadership, you might want to consider at least 2-3 posts per week.”

“And if you can set up a cadence that people start to get used to, for example, ‘Every Monday I share my learnings as a new startup founder,’ and even group those together using a thread, you can start to build an audience over time.”

“If you find yourself delving into more of the thought leadership side, then you may want to time your social posts around your Substack newsletter posts, if and when you plan to run that. You can be episodic and try to schedule ahead if you're talking about big topics, though some of your posts may be driven by breaking news, which may kick up your posts to 3-4 per week.”

3. Engage by Centering Around Other People and Provide Value

Social media for startup founders has rules of engagement. “Number one, you have to make it about the person you are engaging with.” The Leadtail team notes that it can be tempting to try to jump ahead and book sales demos with someone interested enough to post a reply, but that can be premature.

Regardless of whether you’re trying to be the candid, tell-all founder or become a thought leader, the replies you post should be valuable, helpful, and engage people where they are. If you have deep expertise, you can share it in a way that isn’t overbearing. If you have real-world experience with someone else’s question, your insights can speed them along their journey.

“Generally speaking, we recommend that you do not immediately jump in and offer to book a demo. It’s better to make the conversation about the other person, and to focus on being as helpful as possible.”

4. Look for Organic Meeting Opportunities as Appropriate

• Avoid Rushing into Sales Conversations: A response to your post usually isn’t the same thing as confirmed sales interest
• Low-Stakes Meeting Opportunities: Some conversations may pave a path to a low-stakes meeting, such as at a local meetup

No one wants to follow the pushy salesman who didn’t take the hint. Being overly transactional or promotional doesn’t make sense and doesn’t build followings. What might make sense is, one you have a conversation going, looking for an organic opportunity to progress the conversation off of social, potentially in a low-stakes manner.

“After you engage successfully with other people, you might start figuring out how to set up a time to connect at the next local meetup that's happening...the one you were both planning to attend anyway. Alternatively, maybe you jump onto a texting thread.” Regardless, the Leadtail team recommends having an engagement strategy for different types of people on different topics, at different levels of interest, to move from engagement to conversation.

“Meetups are ‘back’ in the startup community. So it’s not uncommon to respond to a conversation with a lightweight follow-up: ‘Hey, this has been a great exchange, but are you going to be at such-and-such event? It’d be great to meet up in person.’” (The social media experts also note that, at least for the time being, this type of chatter tends to work better on Twitter, while direct messages on LinkedIn are generally seen as sales pitches.)

5. Prepare for Scrutiny as You Grow

• Technical Audiences May Be as Passionate as You: Everyone has deeply-held beliefs, so interactions should be respectful, even among differences in opinion
• Your Online History is Forever: Avoid online arguments and negativity that could hurt your brand, since they won’t go away

The Leadtail team notes that there have absolutely been founders who have succeeded on social media by bringing in their own unique personality, being playful or snarky, so long as that was genuinely who they are. However, no one succeeds for long by being consistently negative and attacking people who disagree with you.

“As you grow your following, you still want to be productive and helpful. And for technical audiences, you’d expect people like engineers to be inherently helpful and focus on solving problems. But they may also express a much higher level of disagreement, depending on their experience or conviction. So you’ll want to be aware that not everybody in your community will focus on wanting to be helpful above all else.”

“This is the curve: You start posting on social media, and at first, all you get is crickets. Then one day, you post something, and somebody actually engages with you. You can’t believe it! You want to go tell all your friends somebody engaged. And then you start to get your first negative replies.”

Reminder: Everything You Post Online Is Forever

“This is even more important today than it was 10 years ago: Everything you're doing on social media is public, and will be public forever. We often coach executives on this regarding sensitive topics like politics, but it can also be around technology opinions. As a tech startup founder, you want to be sensitive to the fact that you’re addressing an audience of brilliant engineers who may have very deep convictions about what they do before you slam that new engineering framework in public.”

At the very earliest stages, a founder’s social presence may be virtually indistinguishable from their startup’s. “This is the thing founders have to be aware of. You may hold whatever strong views, political or otherwise, on your personal account, but that reflects on the company you're building and its culture.” It’s often a good idea to work with your co-founders and investors to build an online presence that reflects the kind of culture and brand you want to build.

“Playfulness is one thing, but having a super-snarky troll-like founder is another. Most founders don’t ultimately want to become the next great internet troll. They want to grow their business and raise funding. So over time, marketing teams eventually start doing routine cleanup across their socials, and they’re trying to be aware of the brand they’re building.”

“You can get into trouble when working with executives who get pushed into a place of visibility they didn’t necessarily seek for themselves. They can sometimes be very sensitive to any criticism thrown their way. So it’s a good idea to have training and a plan in place to make sure people on your team aren’t feeding the trolls.”

“Obivously, there’s a balance to strike. It’s possible to not be opinionated enough to break through the noise and just repeat the same thing everyone else is saying. So yes, founders can and should have real opinions, but that doesn’t mean they should be abrasive and troll-like. It’s OK to disagree.”

“We always say: The focus is the future because anyone can have opinions about the future. Who knows what will actually happen? And by the time the future is here, you’re going to have new opinions to share anyway.”