Handmade Canberra is an active business on social media with over 90,000+ followers across the social media platforms we use in our business. Over the years we have learned what platforms work best for us, what our content should be, how often we should post, and of course, we’re learning more every day. How do we achieve this? Through a lot of trial and error, but mainly through making social media marketing the key component of our marketing strategy and devoting the right amount of time and energy to making it work for us.
Why should you even be on social media in the first place?
- It’s the easiest way to connect with your customer. With 16 million Australian Facebook users alone, online is where your customer spends time.
- It’s a great way to get feedback on your business and products.
- It’s current. On social media, you can talk about what’s happening today in a few words and a click.
- It’s a great way to communicate with your customers, respond to comments and even run promotions to get people involved.
But which platform do you use? Do you really need to be on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter? Our opinion is that you don’t, but it’s really important to understand who your customer is (yes, we’ve said it before, we know!) before deciding where to speak from.
Facebook is where you talk to consumers, generally a little older than your instagram customer. It’s an easy place to share links to information and photographs, and possibly the best platform from which to get feedback.
Instagram is more visual and is the best platform for talking to a younger demographic. It’s very quick and easy to post a photo, but less easy to link to websites .
Twitter is good for receiving relevant news and updates and connecting with commercial contacts. Photos and links are possible, but not easy to see at a glance.
It’s not necessary to be on all of these social media outlets, but if you are, be careful to try and post different information on each – someone following you on all three doesn’t want the same photo in each feed, and it’s also advisable to target the audience for each platform with different content.
Aaah, content. What on earth do you say on social media?
Everyone is different, and of course, you need to tailor your content to the people viewing it, but our advice is to start by getting some inspiration and researching. Find a few people you want to follow on each platform and watch what they do. What inspiration can you take from their feed? It’s only by studying similar businesses that inspire you that you will get to know the sort of content you want to create. Trial & error is inevitable. Try posting at different times of the day too. Our advice is to start by mixing news, products, sales & images and links. For example, do you have any new products you want to share? Do you want to tell people what you’ve been working on today? Put up photographs of your office or workshop. Share an article about something that interests you. Talk about the markets you’re attending and review them when you’ve been. Of course, a quirky handmade business will also benefit from posts that have humour but remember, your business’ social media pages are not really the place to post photos of what you had for dinner last night… unless, of course, your business sells food products.
The best rule to stick to is ask yourself this very important question:
Can a visitor to your feed see what your business is and who you are in the first 6 posts?
The next thing to consider is how often you should post. Our advice is to sit down and come up with seven things you think your customer will want to know about your business and seven things that you find interesting and relevant to your business. Write them down and decide on one of each of these per day. Mix it up on different platforms if you are on more than one. A weekly calendar will help you focus on the right content and there are a lot of scheduling tools available to help you automatically push out your content to the relevant social media channels. if you come across posts from others that inspire you, save them to a folder and re visit them when you do your weekly schedule.
Finally, Rome wasn’t built in a day and it takes some time to establish what works for you and the sort of content that you get good responses from. Make sure you reply to peoples’ comments – even if it’s just to say thank you for a compliment- and see where it takes you. You should also comment on other peoples posts as your business because the algorithm loves this and it will help you to be seen more by potential customers.
Good luck with your social media. For other tips on extending your reach and selling more, head to our Brandmade blogs.