[Interview] Rentomojo’s CEO Geetansh Bamania’s take on social media for startups
Immensely passionate risk takers give birth to startups who dare to live on the edge balancing themselves through the massive support of social media. Social Samosa got in conversation with one such risk-taker, founder and CEO of Rentomojo who shared with us the role played by social media for his benefit.
As a start-up what is your main objective from social media? Do you use social for lead acquisition and CRM?
Word of mouth was easy earlier. Social media today is a very cluttered space for brands. Making your way to user’s timeline and newsfeed is not as easy as it used to be since facebook has changed its algorithm. The challenge is to churn out content that’s interesting for people to encourage them to engage & share.
Monitoring by keeping a watchful eye on mentions and chatter around the brand. It’s important to understand what is popular in the space that a brand operates in and closely monitor trends among industry and competition.
Observing user’s social content consumption patterns and changes.
Joining the conversation wherever possible to bring in the personal connect that a brand should have with their audience.
Proactively responding to users and staying focused on core communication objectives of the brand.
Some good tools are Hootsuite, Keyhole for twitter trending activities, Facebook insights dashboard is good. Google analytics can be leveraged to understand how your referral traffic has improved from your campaigns.
Branding of a start-up depends to a great extent on the branding of its CEO. How according to you should a CEO get social in the true sense?
Social is a medium for us to get closer to our end users. The brand gets an opportunity to listen to its users and take their feedback to make big changes. Reviews & Feedback on social media have helped us in a big way. People interested in the company also directly connect with founders on Linkedin. Social media is also a way for founders to talk about their industry & their personal journey as founders. Medium & Linkedin pulse have been pretty powerful where people share stuff right from industry insights to challenges in hiring, managing talent, retaining customers and more. Social is a way for us to collaborate and do more for the overall startup ecosystem.
Right talent acquisition plays a major role in the survival of a start-up. What kind of a role does social media play in hiring the right talent?
Recruiters are the first touch point to the world outside who will look at you as a brand. It’s very critical for your sourcing specialist to connect with the aspirants in a very humble yet inspiring way. Through their Linkedin profiles and their blogs they open the gateway for aspirants to exactly feel what the culture would be like within the company. It’s very important to build a brand which resonates with today’s youth who want to take on bigger challenges, bigger roles and challenge the status quo at each milestone.
What are the major social media mistakes that you think start-ups are committing these days?

