5 tips to monetise your social platform as entrepreneur

Every brand and business is aware of the impact of social media among their customers, whether B2B or consumer facing. This has been exacerbated over the last year, with the pandemic increasing social media usage and engagement. In fact, 44% of people found themselves using social media more than before the COVID-19 outbreak. So, learning how to monetise your social media as an entrepreneur is a natural transition.

Can business leaders afford to ignore the power social media has beyond that of their product and brand awareness? Absolutely not. According to LinkedIn’s own research, there are five million affluent investors using social media to research financial decisions, and 73% of them are using LinkedIn.

With content shared on LinkedIn up 50% year-on-year, it’s more important now than ever to utilise the platform properly and build up a profile that will get your voice noticed as a leading entrepreneur. 

However, there is a significant amount of content from entrepreneurs published on the site daily, from inspirational posts to advice and success stories. Creating targeted content is key to getting yours noticed by the crucial people.

Using tactics that I’ve learned through pitching to investors the traditional way, combined with what I’ve discovered through strategically utilising social media platforms, I successfully managed to make one million pounds from a single LinkedIn post.

How?

That one million pounds was an investment cheque, and the investment came from someone I had never spoken to before or been introduced to. They saw the post and sent me a direct message. Stakester, the esports startup I founded, is two years old and has experienced great user growth recently, leading to the creation of the social post celebrating that success. Although not actively looking for investment, like many other startups we are always open to discussions. 

It’s important to keep up activity on your own profile as well as the business’ to show potential investors in your community that great things are happening. Opportunity and timing is absolutely essential to helping raise your profile, and secure that interest from investors.

Based on my experiences, these are five top tips in creating content that I have found to be the most useful in getting your post noticed and being able to reach investors, and monetise your own social platform. 

1.Demonstrate your growth

Choose a meaningful metric relevant to your business that demonstrates significant growth. Make this the highlight of your post as, ultimately, potential investors will want to be part of the next biggest thing and the more you can position your business as an undiscovered success story, the more likely they will be to pay attention. For my post, I created a simple infographic demonstrating this. 

2. Show it’s happening quickly

Make your growth relatable to a time period, and ideally one that appears as short as possible. This can be as simple as adjusting the way you frame it - for example turn ‘4 weeks’ into ‘1 month’. With the average user only spending 2.5 seconds on content on social media platforms, this number needs to stand out and be impressive.

3. Utilise the algorithms

 The goal is to get your content to be shared and reach as many different networks as possible. LinkedIn prioritises posts that will keep people on their site, so if you need to add a link in, then put it in the comments. Otherwise, keep your data on the platform. Adding relevant hashtags will also maximise the potential reach of your post. Images will naturally grab users’ attention so make sure you choose an interesting and relevant one, as well as a grabbing headline to make people read on. 

4. How to get the views through tactical targeting

Using your connections is important to getting the post to the right people. By adding someone into the post who may have been a part of you or your business’ journey will showcase it on their feed and from there the post can naturally spread further their network as well. I aim to tag people who are either in the sector I want to reach, or associated with them, for example anyone who has invested in the business so fair or has raised investment themselves as they all will have relevant networks. 

5. Sell yourself, not just your business

A growing business success story is undoubtedly an eye-grabber, but what investors will be interested in is whether or not the entrepreneur behind the business - you - will be someone they see themselves believing in to keep that momentum going. Adding personality, not just your product, is something that I have always found to be successful in every medium.