A View from the Top: Hannah Anderson, co-founder of marketing group Social Chain

The social media-savvy entrepreneur on her real lifelong ambition, why the north is the place to be for startups and how it felt to join her childhood hero on a list of the UK’s most influential women

Hannah Anderson was studying to become a teacher when she was approached to join Social Chain

There are just a couple of startup success story tropes that Hannah Anderson subverts, but they’re pretty notable: one, she’s a woman, and two, she had the opportunity to drop out of university – but didn’t.

Growing up in the new town of Washington, between Newcastle and Sunderland, Anderson had one specific ambition from a young age.

“I wanted to be a primary school teacher,” she says. “I remember when I was five years old, looking at my teacher and thinking ‘that’s what I want to do’.”

So she went to Northumbria University to study teaching. It was there that she discovered a new online trend.

“While I was at uni, that’s when social media was really starting to kick off and it fascinated me, Twitter in particular,” Anderson says.

“I saw people, normal people, on Twitter with 10-20,000 followers and it seemed like something I wanted to try my hand at.”

So she did just that – growing a personal account to around 20,000 followers, over a few years, through “tweeting funny, relatable things”.

But, she adds: “It got to a point where I understood that people didn’t give a crap about me, I was just a trainee teacher from the northeast.”

Rather than dwelling on her own perceived insignificance, however, Anderson simultaneously realised: “People care about themselves and their passions.”

And so she began creating Twitter accounts based on what she calls “passion points”, such as Harry Potter – “That account went from zero to 20,000 followers in a week” – and another about “funny things that happen in the game Sims”.

Her fastest-growing Twitter account in this era was Primary School Problems, where she posted a series of wry observations on the universal experience of primary school students, which struck a chord. “It went from zero to 150,000 followers in a week, it absolutely blew up,” she says.

All this activity did not go unnoticed. In 2013, Anderson was approached by Steve Bartlett and Dom McGregor.

“They had an idea for a chain of social accounts coming together to change the way marketing is done,” she explains.

The key to Social Chain’s success is taking those viral accounts, with ready-made audiences comprising tens of thousands of social media followers, and weaving adverts into the content.

Anderson also reveals that her prospective business partners “wanted me to drop out, but I only had a few months left”.

So she continued with her degree, eventually graduating with a first, and then, as she puts it: “Against my parents’ advice, I went and started a company with two strangers off the internet.”

The trio launched the business from a shared working space in London – some of the businesses they originally shared that space with were early investors in Social Chain.

In the beginning, the company was based on the premise of selling space on its social media accounts.

“We lived and breathed it,” says Anderson. “That’s probably why clients started coming to us and asking for more – ‘Can you do our social for us? Can you do our video?’”

“We kept saying yes and Social Chain became a marketing group off the back of it.”

The company has since moved back up north, and now operates from central Manchester.

The move was inevitable, says Anderson. “We’re all northerners. I was getting the train down from Newcastle every Monday.

“We were all sharing an Airbnb – I would have the bed, Steve and Dom would have the floor, there would be somebody on the sofa. It just didn’t make sense.”

An added draw was the newly enlivened tech industry in Manchester: “If you look at the landscape, the tech scene – it’s all happening, especially in the media space.”

The city suits Social Chain’s young workforce: the average age of staff is 22, and Anderson reveals that, at 26, she’s one of the oldest people at the company.

More importantly, she notes that Manchester is “only two and a half hours to get back up and see my family, so it’s a great place to be”.

Anderson is now director of Media Chain, the social media-focused arm of Social Chain, but looking ahead, she isn’t sure about her specific ambitions. “Because I never expected myself to be here, it’s very difficult to define where I want to be. In my heart all I really want is for this company to do the best it can do, because it’s like my baby. I gave up everything I know to do this.”

Most people would say it’s already paid off. Earlier this year, Anderson was named one of Vogue’s 25 most influential women in Britain, alongside the likes of Amal Clooney, Stella McCartney, Dua Lipa – and JK Rowling.

“That was very, very weird, waking up and seeing myself named alongside JK Rowling. She is my number one idol from my childhood,” Anderson says.

However, despite her success in the marketing world, she hasn’t completely abandoned her previous ambitions of teaching.

“It’s still a passion of mine,” she admits. “I’m actually going to do a presentation at my old school soon. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if I did end up back in a classroom at some point.”