Managing a company’s social media account is part timeliness, part consistency, four parts listening and engagement, and a lot of necessary filler. Like any good recipe, to get it right you need to have the right balance of ingredients, and while generally you don’t want filler in your food, it’s a necessary additive so you’re not just left with a big can of spam.
In terms of social media filler, it’s often relevant content, images, graphics, and videos that come from a source outside of your own team. There are a few general, informal rules about this, but typically you split content 70/30 or even 80/20. The larger portion of content goes to relevant fill, with the smaller portion being your blog posts, feature updates, and other ways you want to direct your followers to your websites. Typically this also means that as you share relevant content – while you are contributing to the conversation, you are also pushing people away from your site and that results in zero upfront traffic.
Start a Fire, a new company that launched their product on Product Hunt this month, is looking to retain some of the lost traffic spent on your filler content. With a simple integration tool and easy to use setup process, all of your filler content will have a small branded badge on it. As someone who has managed social media accounts for companies of all sizes over the years, this is not necessarily a new or novel approach; however, the design, implementation, and simplicity of their product makes this noteworthy.
According to Start a Fire CEO and Cofounder, Oren Barzilai, most web traffic is now referred through a company’s social media efforts. Although the range is deep, Barzilai suggests that social media referral traffic can be anywhere from 30-70 percent of all referring traffic.
“What pushed us to start Start a Fire, is we realized that today there are two trends that collided which made this possible,” said Barzilai. “Now every brand, every company in the world they have a blog and a social presence. Finally they know they can’t only share their content, both forwards and backwards. On top of that, in the past couple of years, social media has hit a maturity level where most site traffic comes from social.”
Unlike past solutions Start a Fire does not use iFrames or negatively affect a website’s user experience. Initially a small badge will appear to recognize the brand who share the piece of content, and if moused over promoted content will appear (if set, this is optional).
“We can work with any website; we don’t enable users to do anything bad with our stuff (no adjustment to badge). At the end of the day it’s about the consumer. We see that in the form of the traffic that we generate. Our current click through rate is about 9 percent, and without Start a Fire it’s zero. It’s not only about your followers. If your followers reshare that content, their friends for the first time will be exposed to your content,” Barzilai.
Looking towards the future, Start a Fire will soon be announcing a new round of funding and over the next few weeks will be releasing several new features. They previously raised a seed round of $1 million.
