Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

Major Social Sites Here are some well-known social sites where you could advertise. LinkedIn—LinkedIn’s social network is made up of more than 250 million business professionals. LinkedIn ads allow targeting by job title, company, industry, and other business demographics, all factors you can’t easily target elsewhere. Twitter—Twitter also has roughly 250 million users. Twitter’s ads come in the form of sponsored tweets that appear in users’ feeds. Nikhil mentioned that one of the most effective approaches on Twitter is to turn on paid advertising around real-time events that your audience cares about (e.g., sportswear ads during major sporting events). Facebook—Facebook has more than one billion active users on its social network. From an advertising perspective, Facebook offers companies the ability to buy targeted ads based on users’ interests, pages they like, or even people they’re connected with. This granular targeting allows you to target very small groups of people. In fact, Gabriel once ran a test campaign that targeted only his wife! (He targeted her by her alma mater, zip code, and interest affinities, using a picture of their son to see how long it would take for her to notice. Not very long.) The platform also allows you to reach the larger network of people connected through your fans on Facebook. As Nikhil said: When you buy a Facebook ad, you’re buying more than just a targeted fan; you’re buying the opportunity to access that fan’s social graph. With the ...