An Interview With Stephanie Abrams and Courtney Spritzer: Social Media Masters, Authors, and Founders of Socialfly

I caught up with social media masters Stephanie Abrams and Courtney Spritzer, the founders of Socialfly and authors of the new social media bible, Like.Love.Follow: The Entreprenista’s Guide to Using Social Media to Grow Your Business Socialfly is a New York based social media marketing and public relations agency.

Tell me about your inspiration for SocialFly:

SA: Before I started Socialfly, I was working in the hospitality industry doing sales and marketing for Hilton. I had a lot of friends who were starting businesses, and because of my sales and marketing background, they were coming to me, asking questions about how they should launch their own marketing strategy. I started telling them they really need to start using social media and that it was the way of the future.  This was in 2008-2009, so social media was still in its infancy. I started helping friends on the side of my full time job, and I quickly realized that managing social media for businesses, even businesses that are just starting out, was not an after work activity. It was a full time job. I eventually left my job to start my own agency.

Courtney and I had met through a mutual friend who was also an entrepreneur, and Courtney and I became fast friends. About a year later we formed Socialfly together in 2011.

What makes Socialfly unique?

CS: We’re an office of all women, not done on purpose but it kind of happened that way, and I think that’s something pretty unique about us. We’re all super passionate about social media; we work hard; we play hard. Another thing our clients will always say about us is that we’re always going above and beyond and doing things that are outside the scope. So if our clients tell us that they need a website or tell us that they need something, we have a great network of people that we’ve built and we’re always referring them and connecting them with others that can help them in their career or even in their personal lives.

What are your favorite social platforms, and what do you think is the next up and coming platform?

SA: My favorite platform is Instagram of course. We’re all obsessed with Instagram here and spend a lot of time on it. I love being able to post photos; I just got married a few weeks ago so being able to share all those special moments. I love seeing what other people are doing on Instagram, and everything obviously looks better with a filter, and discovering new products and services through Instagram is always something that’s exciting.

I think that Periscope is going to get bigger and bigger over the next year. Live streaming video is just going to become more and more popular for brands.

CS: I agree with Stephanie; my favorite is definitely Instagram. I love going on there and following fashion bloggers to get inspiration for myself, as well as using it to keep in touch with my friends. I am still a big fan of Facebook, especially for sharing an important album or staying in touch with friends that I haven’t seen, or even family members who no longer live in New York, so Facebook and Instagram are definitely my two favorites.

What would you say is a key piece of advice for startups trying to use social to grow their business?

SA: The first piece of advice I would give startups would be if they don’t have experience with social media, their first step should be to get in touch with a company like us or someone that they know who can help guide them with what they should do. The first step really is putting a strategy together for their business. Especially when you’re first starting out, It doesn’t necessarily mean that these brands have to be on every single platform, but they should use the platforms that make the most sense for their business based on their goals. So putting together a strategy, which means determining what their overall business goals are and then figuring out which platforms make the most sense for them to be on, create content on, run advertising on, that are going to give them the best results.

In general for business owners, determine what you know and what you don’t know, and if there are things you don’t know, find an expert or find someone who can really help you so you don’t waste time doing things you don’t know how to do.

As far as a strategy, I’d say listening to your audience and your customers. One thing I’ll see a lot of startups do is ask questions to their followers and their customers so they can collect information to make business decisions. For example, there was a client that we worked with that created handbags in different colors and patterns, and she would ask her Facebook fans and her audience for input when deciding between say two patterns. That’s how they would make decisions in their business on which new handbags to produce. So using your audience to crowd source and ask questions so you can make great business decisions.

As entrepreneurs and founders of a small but fast growing business, what advice do you have for other people looking to start their own companies?

SA: My first piece of advice would be to meet and grab coffee with other people in your industry or other people who have started businesses before. Even in New York City people are super friendly and always willing to help. So getting coffee, joining networking groups, joining entrepreneur groups so you can learn as much as possible, and really creating a community around yourself so that when you do have questions or do have trouble in your business, you have other like minded people to bounce ideas off of. You don’t necessarily have to pay someone $500 an hour to ask them a question; you have other really smart people and you build up this circle around you.

CS: I would say do a lot of research before you decide to spend all of your time and money running your business. Do some testing, meet with people, do research on the competitors in the industry, and tell people about your idea and get their feedback.  I think what we’ve seen working with entrepreneurs and meeting entrepreneurs is that people will become so passionate about something that they’re not seeing the big picture, and they push hard to make something work when maybe they needed some tweaking and changing. So just being the type of person that asks for feedback, does a lot of research, and does a lot of testing before making decisions.

What made you decide you wanted to write a book?

CS: Early on when Stephanie and I founded our company, we were working with a lot of women entrepreneurs, and we were also forming friendships with a lot of entrepreneurs. So throughout our career we’ve been very supportive of other women founders. We knew we always wanted to write a book, so when we were writing about our experiences with social media and using social media to leverage our business, we really wanted to differentiate ourselves from all the other social media educational books that were out there, so we thought why not dedicate this book to women.

Why should we read your book?

SA: Like. Love. Follow. is a book that will guide entrepreneurs and business owners with best practices on each social media platform. We include do’s and don’ts for each platform, and we make it very simple and easy to understand. We already see from people who have read the book that they walk away with ideas and things that they can execute on right away to help their business.