How to Validate Ideas Using Social Media

Social media is beautiful

You can reach so many people, and they can reach you, and it’s all free! So, how do you leverage the freedom of digital communication to validate your ideas?

Get a cool name

You can change the name of your project or idea later, remember now you’re just validating your idea. So, grab something quirky and set up a Twitter or Instagram account. Set it up in the name of your project.

Write a brief description of the idea in the description. Go and find a logo generator and pick one you like. Upload that as your profile picture.

Build a landing page

You’ll need a landing page that explains your idea. If you have one, great, but if not, check out this piece on building one. Join our online course to find out how to build landing pages for free.

Start sharing thoughts

Get tweeting, or posting pictures. Look for hashtags in the same sphere as your idea. Tweet other people who follow those hashtags or are relevant. Message them and say ‘I’ve just launched, what do you think about this product?’.

Set up some tools

For Twitter, you can find tools that do a lot of the work for you. They can automatically follow accounts, retweet content, post links, and you can even draft and schedule your content to go out at peak times. Set it and forget it. Go back, tweet more. See what happens. Building up an understanding of what people think about your product or idea.

After a month, let’s say, you can probably assess from the feedback, whether you have a feasible idea or not.

Where is your target audience?

Twitter might not be right for you, especially if you have a technical B2B solution. In that case, you might want to try LinkedIn. If your idea is community or social based, Facebook will be much better for you. Find the right people, ask them for their thoughts, and make a note.

Questionnaire

You can also do a nice and easy piece of market research with an online form from websites like Survey Monkey. These are highly customisable and will provide you with a huge amount of information. Remember, try to detail the problem as much as possible.

In our membership club we tell you how to create landing pages for free, utilise tools to automate your social media, and create effective surveys.

Have you joined up to our  "6 Week Welcome Email Series" yet? This takes you incrementally through setting a vision and generating ideas. Click the button below.

Mark Shayler and Daniel O'Connor are hosting a webinar on how to validate your ideas. We will take you through it, help you validate ideas and have a Q&A.  More info and register below.