Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Moving to Social Media: Updates from the Hatcheries

Through the Butler Launch Pad, the Blank Center awards graduate and undergraduate student entrepreneurs access to professional and semiprivate workspace to grow their businesses. Known as the hatcheries, these spaces encourage ideation and collaboration. In a series of blog posts, this semester’s hatchery teams will go beyond the four walls of their offices and share their experiences, advice for other entrepreneurs, and industry expertise with us.

The following post is written by Ryo Shibasaki MBA’19, founder of Path to Success and Hatchery entrepreneur.

In my previous blog post, I shared my experience in SEO about how to get your page ranked high on Google. My website reached almost 200,000 PV (page views) last month, but I lost 30% of them in one night. What happened? Google changed its search engine algorithm dramatically on March 12th, 2019. A lot of websites were affected by the change.

What I realized is that relying only on SEO is a massive risk for any business. Google changes its algorithm frequently and makes a huge change every 1 or 2 years. You cannot expect when or how they are going to change.

The night I lost 30% views, I started thinking. Adjusting my SEO approach to new algorithm takes time; is there any way to recover the readership quickly? I know I need to build other marketing channels and my next focus is social media.

I haven’t spent a lot time on social media since I am just a one man show and am not a social media guy. However, I do know that if you have a lot of followers and social media activities on your business account, it can bring more visitors to your website and also can be a good signal for SEO. The most popular social media are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I decided to focus on Twitter first.

As a result, I got 400+ followers (10% increase) in one week without using mutual following. One simple but effective strategy is retweeting tweets of someone who has a significant number of followers, with an insightful comment. It is highly possible that the author shares your comment and his/her followers will follow your account if they are interested in you. If you just started your Twitter account and haven’t figure out an effective way to increase followers, I highly recommend that you try this strategy.

Another thought I want to share is that if you’re going to do business by yourself, you may face a lot of trouble or accidents on a daily basis. Maybe you will feel frustrated or even desperate for a while, but the true entrepreneur should always think how to solve the problem and keep taking action. It is like Babson’s philosophy: Entrepreneurial Thought and Action.