30+ Social Media Business Ideas (List & Examples)

Tim and I met during an online hackathon. During the hackathon participants were encouraged to meetup for real. We actually got on really well, and stayed friends and kept spitballing ideas for a startup for years.

At this time, I was a design student at Central Saint Martins and I had recently won a competition for Sony Music creating an interactive music video for the band Hurts with my friend Virgil. Then soon after graduation, I started working as a creative technologist in London for a bunch of different advertising & branding agencies and a few startups too.

I’ve always been a fanatic reader, specifically in the thriller genre. I discovered Dan Brown as a kid, then James Rollins, and I’ve always love action movies that combine adrenaline and history (think National Treasure, Indiana Jones, etc.).

I decided to write a book (my first was called The Golden Crystal, and it has been re-launched as The Atlantis Stone) when my grandfather passed away. He had always been a strong positive influence in my life, and he, my dad, and I often swapped paperbacks we liked. That first book was intended as a gift for my dad for Christmas, and it was going to be the only one I ever wrote -- just to see if I could do it.

I had no idea what I was doing (arguably, I still don’t…). I just thought it would be fun to combine technology with the discovery of Atlantis… in some way. When I got started, I was naive enough to think that books simply happen, but the book very quickly got the best of me. I took a six-month break and consumed as much as I could on the subject of the craft of writing fiction. I’d never really written anything before, so it was an eye-opening experience to learn about structure, plot tropes, character development, and everything else that goes into a good, cohesive story.

I started off by running and owning a hosting company called Empire Host. We had about 3K clients at the time support was run from two offices in India with nearly 30 employees.

We were also providing an outsourcing package. Our business solutions were really cheap and to be frank, our results were mediocre at best. Although the service was fine for any mom and pop shop or even an “any results will do” kind of company, we noticed that too often, people who run tech companies actually outsourced to companies such as ourselves even work that went into their core offering - because it was cheap.

At the time, what outsourcing really was, was an arbitrage business. But the concept that people would outsource big chunks of their business to a company that does not provide the same level of communication, process, quality control, and culture just because they’ll save a lot of money, that idea really stuck with me.

My personal background is in B2B enterprise sales, and at my previous employer, things were going great for the first 2.5 years that I was an employee there. I moved up quickly, was promoted twice, and actually had the opportunity to build out a team. Unfortunately, one day that all changed and I realized that I was deeply unhappy, and after years of trying and failing to start businesses online I thought that maybe it was time for one more go.

Your pot of gold and freedom is out there somewhere, but you will never find it until you start looking for it.

The company I was working for announced that it was being acquired, so I decided to give my old friend Derek a call. Initially, I pitched him on starting a recruitment agency together (both of us had started our careers at an executive search office together). He said that he would think about it, and actually came to me with the idea for an SMMA (Social Media Marketing Agency).

Back in 2013, I had already discovered my passion - personal development - and had realized writing is the best way to express myself. So I combined these and started a self-improvement blog.

Starting the blog was the best decision and not giving up on it over the years (even when no traffic or money was coming in) was what helped me move forward.

It was first just a hobby and I knew nothing about blogging. Over the years, after publishing a ton of content, gaining traffic, learning about SEO, email marketing, social media, and all the ways to monetize a blog, it became a real business.

I spent the majority of my upbringing in the SF Bay Area a few towns over from Palo Alto. It was an exciting time to live in Silicon Valley-- I distinctly remember the line of people camping out for the release of the very first iPhone as Steve Wozniak rolled up on his Segway to say hi. With an adversarial stubbornness unique to teenagers, I set my sights on the furthest thing I could think of from Silicon Valley and startup culture; working in the music industry.

I spent the first half of my twenties vying for a job in music, and the second half living out my aspirations, spearheading marketing efforts for indie and major labels. Working in music certainly delivered on my original plan to avoid innovation and technology at all costs. Eventually, the limitations of such an environment caught up with me and after two years at Sony Music, I was deeply frustrated by the company’s inflexible and outdated culture.

In an effort to feel professionally fulfilled, I was desperately seeking new challenges outside of work. Around the same time within Sony, we were starting to heavily utilize influencers to market our artists. Through this direct exposure, I was introduced to the world of influencer marketing. At the time, it was late 2015 and I was overcome with excitement for the potential of this new type of marketing. It had all the makings of the perfect storm of opportunity-- no clear best practices, few regulations, & little to no standardization.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do after college. My dad was an entrepreneur, and I had the spirit, but with no direction. I got a job in marketing/communications and ran a music production side hustle for a while.

I tried my hand at music full time and basically broke even after a year. I read The 4-Hour Work Week and started learning about online business, passive income, WordPress and SEO.

In 2012, I graduated from a small school in Pennsylvania called Grove City College, where I got my degree in finance. After graduating, I worked a few jobs in corporate finance and absolutely hated it. The sad part was that almost everyone I worked with also hated their jobs, and would trudge through their misery week after week, motivated only by the promise of a weekend off, or those glorious 2–3 weeks of vacation each year. The golden handcuffs are a very real thing.

I wanted to take advantage of us being small and, as Paul Graham has famously said, “do things that don’t scale” by really wow-ing the users during the onboarding experience.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to leave the corporate finance world and join a startup that a former classmate from college was starting. I came on board to help with marketing, but took a pretty substantial pay cut from what I was making before, as the founder of that company had only raised a small friends-and-family seed round to get things up and running.

Before I launched Entrepreneurs On Fire I was working in Commercial Real Estate, which meant I was spending a lot of time in the car driving to show properties and meet with clients.

That’s when I had my own ah-ha moment: why isn’t someone creating a daily podcast for people like me, who have to drive to and from work every day and want to consume inspiring content? … Be the change.

Because I was not a huge fan of the radio, I started listening to podcasts. They were like a breath of fresh air: on-demand, valuable content that gave me advice, tips and tactics about any topic I was interested in for free.

We both had previous experience in another start-up called Soul id which was a social media platform for action sports. We ran the marketing and media at that company which was a blast. After we left that company, we split directions. Eli got involved in the eCommerce industry by starting a brand called Winterial which he grew to hundreds of SKUs. Kyle headed in the media direction and started a commercial photography company where he worked with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

At this time Kyle wanted to be able to get back in the start-up world, grow a large brand and a team of like-minded creatives and innovators. So like any entrepreneur, he jumped on Google and started to search for media companies that were also technology-based companies as well. That is where the inspiration of starting a digital agency that solely focused on the media portion for brands and product companies came to life.

Culture is the centerpiece of a successful company. Creating a place for employees to come to work and enjoy what they do, the environment and who they work with will pay long term dividends.

We have been running a design agency for the past 10 years as a side business. After gaining inspiration from some of our competitors in this domain providing a productized service, we came up with an idea for an even better process that is more optimal and efficient bringing out better results at a more affordable cost comparatively.

The most effective method we tried for our validation was initiating a conversation with every person who visited our website to understand more about what they were looking for and what would make Draftss an ideal provider for their needs.

We wanted to productize the design and code service domain, where a design team is like a product subscription. You buy a Design or Code subscription and equip yourself with a design or/and development team that can get everything done for you. Subscribe when you require projects to be completed, unsubscribe once you are done.

I’m Amanda Shepherd, the owner and lead mentor at the Social Media Manager Society. Aside from social media consulting to businesses in the food, beverage, and hospitality industries, I created a program to teach other women how to run successful social media businesses so they can have the time and financial freedom they’ve always wanted!

I quit my 9-5 and in one year made almost $100,000 working an average of four hours per day - and still growing!

Both my wife and I are software developers. We decided to start building software that helps bloggers understand the results of their content and its impact on social media. My wife had experience as a blogger and for me, digital marketing is one of my passions, as well as Internet businesses. At the time, I had 14 years of experience in software development with different companies and I felt confident that it was time to build our own project.

My way of managing the business is quite conservative and prudent, I often question whether or not I should have taken a more aggressive path when it came to investments and funding.

It all started as a side project because we both had our respective jobs. Metricool was initially offered at no cost as an experiment. However, in a short time, between 4,000 and 5,000 people had signed up, which encouraged us to make the jump and test a new business model based on a Premium subscription. We included some professional features focused on social media managers and the results were promising. Six months later, we reached a monthly recurring revenue of $3,000 which was the final push to help us decide that it was the right moment to dedicate more time to the project, quit my day job, and start building a team to boost the growth.

The business started with $10,000 that we had earned during the first few months of Metricool. We contributed an additional $10,000 from our family savings and $30,000 that my mother lent us. We wanted to avoid external financing (such as Venture Capital or Business Angels) because with 50k and some recurring revenue we could proceed even if it was a little slower at first.

I started building web applications in Ruby on Rails in 2005, after several years of hacking together things in PHP, HTML, and Wordpress. In 2006, I launched Curbly.com, which was meant to become a social network for people interested in interior design and DIY (sort of what Houzz is today).

Over time, Curbly evolved into a pure blogging business - we hired writers, created content, and sold advertising and sponsored posts. InfluenceKit was really the result of an internal tool I developed to manage our entire blogging process at Curbly. It worked so well for us that eventually, I decided to turn it into a product.

My background in running a blogging business for more than ten years gave me a deep understanding of many of the needs of our potential customers. I knew most of their pain points and could speak about them in terms that resonated right away.