Why Do You Need an Online Presence?

Why Do You Need an Online Presence?

Sean: So we have people tuning in the podcast today. We have over 4000 followers on Spotify, over 10,000 listeners. It’s been a little over two years and they’re listening to you right now.

Sean: And they’re thinking, why is this important for me? I’m just starting out. No one cares about who I am and my business is under the radar right now. It’s just been three years. Yeah, I have a million problems. Yeah, I have a million things getting done every day and I have to get them done. But why is this relevant and important to me?

Bant: Yeah. So, you know, when you’re starting a business, they’re kind of as you outlined yourself Sean, there’s very little separation between the founder and their new enterprise that they’ve started.

Bant: And so when people go out and you go out to meet people in business, whether they be partners that you’ll work with, vendors that you need, customers that you want to acquire, they will really want to validate your business. And in some ways, whether they do this before they meet you or after they meet you, they’re certainly going to be looking you up online. And what they see there really matters. It matters in terms of your credibility as an executive and as a business.

Bant: And so one of the classic things is that when you look up a business and you find very little information about a company or an individual, it challenges the credibility of that business. So there’s a bit of the kind of the instant background check that is very important for startups. What we find is that when an individual builds out a presence, the engagement that they’ll get, the exposure that they’ll get is anywhere between 4 to 20 times higher on their own pages than their brand pages. And it’s much more expensive to grow a brand than an executive page. And so we would recommend that you start there and then kind of do it in tandem with your brand efforts. And then, as you said Sean, at some point, it becomes easier to start kind of naturally organically growing that brand effort. So it’s critically important because it gets you off the bat. It gets you some notoriety that can help you raise money. And I can tell you my personal story is that I started posting on Twitter at the time about online reputation management, and I started to get some direct messages back that said, ‘Hey, what are you working on from VCs?’ And all of our initial money came in from inbound efforts, from things that I was posting out about