Product Review: Entrepreneurship 101 Community Building Top Tools for Early Adopter Growth

You’ve hung out your shingle and now officially label yourself as an entrepreneur. You’ve created a landing page, set up a Twitter account, and launched your Facebook business page. Now what? How do you go from a speck on the startup map to a bustling business rolling in revenues?

One word: community. Without a loyal community spreading words of your company, your chances of survival are minuscule. If you’re able to grow legions of loyal fans early on, you stand a much greater chance of survival. But building a community isn’t just a matter of engaging with potential customers on Twitter or posting snippets on Facebook in the hopes you’ll earn a few likes. You need to approach building a community like a soldier on a tactical assault. With the right ammunition and tools in your arsenal, you can grow a network of early adopters and brand loyalists. If you’re prepared to put in the effort, the following are five tools you can use to accelerate your community’s growth:

 SignUpFirst

SignUpFirst is a must-discover resource for entrepreneurs who want to build a loyal following around their startup or side-project.
SignUpFirst lets you offer deals to early adopters in exchange for their patronage. Offer discounts, giveaways, premium access, or even verified badges touting early adopter status. Reward your first users while building a community around your company; can you say winning strategy?

Nouncy

Nouncy offers another social media sharing platform to entrepreneurs. Your company can connect with early adopters on Twitter and Facebook and create campaigns to encourage social shares of your brand’s message. Add the image and URL you want to be shared and let your fans help you grow your community.

Erlibird

Erlibird helps entrepreneurs find fans for their company. Launch your startup on Erlibird and receive feedback on your product or service while you’re still in alpha or beta stage. Form relationships with your early product advisors and encourage social media sharing to facilitate community growth.

Discova

Discova offers a powerful search engine for entrepreneurs and their companies. List your startup, add category tags like the cloud, SaaS, or social, and connect with consumers and investors on the hunt for specific types of companies. Whether you’re creating an education, design, security, or travel startup, you can find fans for your venture thanks to Discova.

And yes, The ScopeWeekly

Yes, this is a shameless plug butThe ScopeWeekly can really help you gain credentials and increase your visibility. Garnering media attention is crucial for entrepreneurs attempting to build profitable businesses. Thanks to RPRNmag, attracting attention to your venture is a simple task. RPRNmag offers everything from product reviews to news stories about up-and-coming entrepreneurial ventures. With their easy-to-use “Got a Tip” function, attracting eyeballs to your business is super easy. Send a news tip about your business or contribute as a guest blogger. Building a following for a business is crucial for early stage entrepreneurs. When you add RPRNmag to your arsenal, building credentials is easy.

Now How to Measure Metrics?

Now that you have built up your audience, you will want to use good tools to collect, monitor and analyze your metrics and results. The right tools will help you make sense of the data and develop improved campaigns moving forward.
eClincher Inc.

Some of these Media Tools are free; some are fee-based while others offer a free trial to test them out. These tools are to be used to measure success in PR, Social Media, and Marketing and are of great help to all communications professionals in 2017 looking to improve their results.

For Marketers: Adobe SiteCatalyst provides marketers with actionable, real-time intelligence about online strategies and marketing initiatives. SiteCatalyst quickly identifies the most profitable paths through the company website, determine where visitors are navigating away from their site, and identify critical success metrics for online marketing campaigns.

For PR: Meltwater helps PRs demonstrate their success in simple, clear metrics. Meltwater is a media intelligence company who provides media monitoring and social media monitoring to help companies grow and build the brand.

For Social Media: eClincher’s platform for social media publishing, monitoring, and analysis empowers businesses to gain actionable insight into consumer sentiment of their brand, product, or market by monitoring and connecting into the conversations in online media.  You can monitor what people are saying about your brand, products or industry terms on various social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Google Buzz, Blogs, and News.

For all communication professionals: Digimind provides a comprehensive suite of tools to support the repetitive tasks of competitive intelligence, including data collection, information management, data analysis and publication – while supporting all Internet formats, such as web pages, invisible web, blogs, forums, RSS feeds.

Building a community amongst your early users is essential if you want long-term growth. Press mentions are fleeting. Early adopters and brand enthusiasts will continue to share their enthusiasm for your company long after journalists and tech reporters have moved on to their next discovery. Will you be using any of the above-listed tools to grow your network of early enthusiasts?

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