These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the HowMaths team, formed by Jorge Muñoz.
All of us are aware of the power of social networks in the communication among people. These networks have also a huge impact in how the advertisers can promote their products, but the whole potential of the marketing in the social networks are the recommendations.
What is worth about the recommendations is that they are given by a known person. We don’t receive information about a product from an unknown source, we get it from a trusted source. We are more likely to take into account this kind of information. Here is the real power of recommendations for the companies, make their customers and user to talk about how good are our products to their friends. Or at least make them talk about us to let other people know we exist.
It is very important for big companies make their customers talk about them and recommend their brand, but it is critical for small companies that are starting. Startups usually do not have a lot of resources to spend and they must use them carefully and social networks are really cheap if they focus in a very specific market.
Once a startup has identify the market of their product, its best strategy to grow is to make their first customers its sales force. Make the customers talk about the company and their products. Of course the company must have a good product, otherwise is dead. But how a company can achieve this?, because let it happen from scratch does not work. The best way is to offer advantages or promotions to the first customers. So they are happy both the product and the relationship with the company. A good way to achieve this is offering the promotions only when they talk about the product in a social network, but in a controlled way. You can include a tweet button (or facebook share button) with a message than when it is published the customer receives the promotion. Also the invitations works very well, the users can send invitations to use the product to their friends and when a friend accepts the invitation the customer get the promotion.
One of the best examples of this type of marketing has been dropbox. Dropbox allows you to have a virtual hard disk on the cloud, on Internet, and you can access from any device to your virtual disk. What this company has done to make the customers talk about it, is to offer them more space when they talked about the product in social networks or when they invite friends to use dropbox.
In some way a company can drive their customers to talk about their products when it offers promotions or any other advantage to these customers. But the product must be good enough and the company must assure somehow only good comments or/and have a good plan to change the opinion of people who shits about the product in social networks. Social networks are very powerful.
Remember: a friend recommending you a product is much better than anyone else doing it.
