As a member of an early stage startup, let's say a technical founder, should one be tuned in to social media? What is one leaving on the table one way or the other? What advice would you give for making best use of such tools, and balancing the associated challenges?
PROS<p>* Potential marketing for your startup, especially if you gain followers that are also in your target audience.<p>* Have a way for someone (e.g. investor, potential employee, potential business partner, etc) to look you up and see what kind of person you might be.<p>CONS<p>* Distraction away from your customers and team, which should be among your top priorities. It can take time to cultivate a social media presence.<p>* Misinterpretation risk. For better or worse, if you happen to say something that can be misinterpreted, and someone has an agenda against you, social media can be risky. Assume that everything you say can be posted on a billboard in every major city.<p>MY $0.02<p>Each of these carry different weights. I would argue that the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.<p>If you want marketing benefits, you'll get more bang for your buck by having someone with lots of marketing experience. Being discoverable by investors via social media is really a minor thing; you'd have to substantially invest in your "social media reputation" in order for this to give you anything, and even then, it's more useful as a tool to maybe get meeting with an investor, than it is to secure funding from that investor.<p>Being a distraction from your core priorities is really the most important thing I'd offer. Social media can easily be a black hole for attention and time. That's attention and time you can't afford to lose right now.
I removed all social media and I found that for the development community specifically, the only social apps that really matter are GitHub (if you consider that social) and Twitter. I had no problem as a dev removing Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.<p>When I removed Twitter, I found that there was definitely a missing piece of my outreach to the community. If you use Twitter effectively, it <i>can</i> help build your personal brand which, in turn, can help your company's brand.<p>Just don't let it turn into mindless surfing. Keep your activity tactical with a marketing objective. The goal is to add value to your business in terms of hiring and technical influence.
You should definitely be on Twitter and Facebook, but a better question is if you should be active on these social networks.<p>Unless you are producing lots of marketing materials (tutorials, new features, blog posts, etc) and/or creating an audience I don't think you should invest resources in being active. A simple light presence should be enough.<p>Lots of people (myself included) prefer to send a tweet to a project/company than sending an email. This has the advantage that it's a public indexable conversation that could, given the circumstances, even become viral.
I think twitter is largely useless with the exception being using it as one of many avenues to detect unhappy customers so you can identify and help them, like Zappos does.
What is the outcome that you desire? Dont just join twitter. Do it with a purpose in mind. It is certainly very useful, but having no strategy will net you zero results. Figure the outcome first, otherwise you will miss.
A lot of developers especially high profile ones are on Twitter. It’s a decent platform for catching up on news as well as promote your company or get its name out there.