Start A Fire – Social Media & Content Marketing

Anyone who has tried to gain some kind of traction from a Social Media campaign will know that it is often a lot of work for little return. Start A FIRE is a new kid on the block, designed to help with that.

The main problem is one of reach – the extent to which your message is shown to others who may be interested in it. If you have only a few followers then your Tweets, Posts and other content will only be seen by a fraction of an already small number – most social media platforms will not show your posts to everyone on your follower list and even if they did they are unlikely to be seen by all of the people all of the time.

This raises two issues – the need to increase your follower count and the need to get your stuff shown not only to your followers but to others as well so that you can grow your list, and your business.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others have tackled this by developing their own equivalents to Google’s AdWords PPC advertising service. You can pay to promote your posts in various ways across all of those platforms and the results are often very successful and cost-effective. Cost effective yes but cost free, no! You still need a hefty budget if you are to make any serious headway with paid advertising on any platform, including Social Media.

So that is why I am very pleased to be able to draw your attention to “Start A Fire” which, although not entirely original, certainly opens up a few doors to those who want to make a name for their business on social media.

The idea is simple, you create a badge with your logo, links, and a limited amount of other information. The badge is then placed on content that you recommend to others on your follower list and anyone else that might see it. This was originally designed to work with “curated content”, i.e. someone else’s content that you want others to see.

You can make your recommendations but when someone takes a look at the article or whatever it is, your badge will be shown on the screen so that people can click back to you for more. Start A Fire claim that follower lists can grow very quickly by this method and I would certainly recommend that you give it a try.

For most people, even companies, Start A Fire will be free to use so there’s no reason not to give it a go. The idea isn’t totally unique, Outbrain and Taboola both offer an upmarket and paid-for variation on this technique – although they are not really specifically aimed at Social Media whereas Start A Fire is. Perhaps the closest match out there is snip.ly which is also free up to a point and well worth trying.