I have a confession to make. I hate Facebook. The combination of visual clutter, people sending me happy hour drinks that I can’t actually drink, and the strangeness of interacting with my siblings’ old high school friends makes my head want to explode.
Perhaps you feel the same way I do. Or maybe you can’t, for the life of you, get what the big deal is about Twitter.
But guess what, marketing isn’t about you and what you like. It’s about your customers.
And chances are, your customers are on Facebook. (Ok, this is because everyone is on Facebook, but still…) When you think about your marketing efforts, you shouldn’t be thinking about what comes easiest to you. You should be thinking about who you customers are and where they hang out. You can’t expect your potential customers to come find you in your space. You need to meet them where they live. (No, I don’t mean go knocking on their doors. I mean where they live online.)
This can mean making sure you have a presence on Facebook or whatever the social media site du’ jour is. (Yes, it does change from time to time.) But it can also mean finding the little niches that your customers hang out in and meeting them there.
Is there a shopping blog that all your customers adore? Make it a point to comment regularly there (useful comments please) or even volunteer to write a guest column. Or maybe your product is geared towards working moms. Is there a working mom forum you can join? Think about who your ideal customer is, and try to go where they go.
Today is the day to stop putting off your marketing efforts because you don’t like or don’t understand something. If your potential customers are there, it’s your job to be there too.
Want more ideas for marketing your business? Check out the Marketing Kick Start online workshop on Wednesday, May 19th.
Well said! I enjoy facebook for keeping in touch with friends, but didn’t really want to mess with a fan page. A few weeks ago I decided to just do it and make a fan page. It’s definitely helped with exposure and sales so far.
I’m also looking into joining a forum that I know my customer base visits frequently.
I don’t want to spread myself too thin, but at the same time you gotta get your name out there.
Good morning. Quite good advice. Over the past 2 years I’ve served an apprenticeship in an urban consignment & vintage boutique. The second most important lesson about retailing – the most important was about thieves – is that it is not always about you. While it is important to present your personality and sense of style in the establishment (real or virtual), inventory is NOT always about you. The same holds true about the topic of your article and using FB has been most helpful in presenting the store’s goods and personality. The shop is about to undergo a change and it is the perfect time to jump into Twittermania. Despite one’s personal feelings about social media, a practical compromise can and should be made for your business. Well done – again.
DD@Phila
Good morning, Megan! For a while I resisted the whole Twitter and Facebook thing because I felt that it would overwhelm me a bit, but now that I’ve actually caved in and started utilizing those resources I find that I actually enjoy it! Plus, it’s always great to be able to connect with customers on a more personal level- I love that!
I can give or take the whole social networking thing. I do it in waves. I’ll tweet about a upcoming show or a piece I’m excited to show, but to be honest, I don’t find much difference if I’m not doing it. I find it to be more enjoyable to do it because I want to, not because I feel the need to. (plus, when Starbucks and Sears have twitter and fan pages, the trend just might be over)
Facebook is cool because I am usually pleasantly surprised at the responses I get when I post something about my art. It’s usually those high school people and old friends who actually care, rather than the “craft community” who are all doing that same things to try to be seen. Sometimes at all feels like preaching to the choir, ya know…
On a personal note, if I’m going to a forum to find out about the best meditation for my baby’s diaper rash, I certainly don’t want to wade through pages of people posting their newly listed products… That’s spam.
Kerry Alice – agreed, you should never spam a forum with info about your products. But if you participate in a forum that allows you to include a link to your website in a signature or on a profile page (and you participate with quality, useful content) this can be a way to let other people know about your business.
Well put. I was a little hesitant about making a Facebook page, opening a twitter account and linking my Etsy shop. It is remarkable to see how social interactions help to grow your visibility beyong traditional Gallery representation. I have chosen to keep my profile spare in order to reserve my Facebook presence for my business. I do try to add pages that my fans may find interesting along with related posts about things I am doing. Love your blog Megan.
Thanks for the food for thoughts… I love Twitter and, just like you, hate Facebook (or what I have seen and understood of it, as I don’t even have an account), but I was thinking about perhaps creating a fan page anyway. Your post put clear words on what was a just a vague sensation in my mind (“it’s my business, not me”).
My main fear if I end up making the plunge is not to be able to maintain both (+ my blog, + flickr…), especially if there’s one I like and the other I dislike (and I was told that a soulless fanpage would be worst than no Facebook account at all), but I’ll definitely keep your post in mind while I think about it further, thank you!
I spend (quite a bit of time) time on facebook and write on my wall every single day and several times a day.
I don’t get twitter at all. But I know it is important. So I post stuff on twitter and retweet really worthy articles, yours included. I confess my awkwardness on twitter is really quite embarrassing.
I comment on important people’s blogs; yours included. Sometimes it’s hard to find valuable comments but I strive to contribute.
This morning I found 4 local Pages to contribute too. And I feel it is REALLY important to market locally.
So I agree, it is not about you! Someone I network with said you should spend no more than 15 minutes a day on Facebook, but I spend about 2 hours a day. But that is where my friends hang out.
Well, that is all. Mondays are hard to get a groove on for me and I have already been online WAAY too long!
Have a wonderful week, Megan and you are highly appreciated!
Very good post!
The importance of social networking sites can’t be overlooked. As a culture obsessed with immediacy, attention span is on the decline. Lack of attention and interest in the world around us usually leads to isolation. Social networking sites provided people with a sense of community where they can go for news and and stay current with events important to them. Not only has a new vocabulary emerged around these sites, but we also now have a whole generation of social networking gurus/experts! Sometimes it seems like we’ll have to learn an entirely new way of interacting with one another.
So far, my experience with social networking sites (I have a FB profile page and business page, Twitter and Flickr accounts, as well as a blog and website) reinforces what I believe to be true about human nature and getting along in general. If you express your curiosity, be open to learning about others and talk about what you are truly passionate about, you develop a community around you. The trick with social networking sites is to distill the information to its essence and provide enough stimulating visual material to draw the readers in.
I don’t have massive numbers of followers, but at least that number is constantly inching upward – an encouraging trend. I’ve also come to realize that building a true community takes effort, time and patience; no different than building communities in the past. As a small business owner, my success depends on how large and engaged my community is…so I’m going to keep plugging away at developing it!
I really like what Joana above me just said: ” If you express your curiosity, be open to learning about others and talk about what you are truly passionate about, you develop a community around you. The trick with social networking sites is to distill the information to its essence and provide enough stimulating visual material to draw the readers in.”
Particularly this tiny phrase….If you express your curiosity, be open to learning about others and talk about what you are truly passionate about, you develop a community around you.
I do believe that this has been missing in my blog in particular. I CAN write about what I am truly passionate about! THANK YOU Joana!
Well said! There’s nothing worse than a facebook page that had one post three months ago or a twitter account that’s only links to newly posted works.
It’s worth remind us all that these social networky places are not just about posting the occasional ad, but about finding the kind of social relationship with our customers that the regular trunk show used to bring.
*even if I still use ‘the twitter’ mostly for chatting with my friends about sports.
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on a techie note – is there a way to automatically post to facebook what you’ve twittered or vice-versa? or blogged or whatever? I’m not a big twitter person but I do for some reason get great joy out of stalking other people’s baby pictures on facebook. I’ve seen a quick reference to “Twitter deck” and other posts that say “via Networked Blogs” ???
there’s got to be a way to streamline it all these days right?
I approached Facebook and the like with much resistance – especially Twitter; I couldn’t see the point and didn’t really want to know what other people were doing every minute of the day. But after some great advice that each post gets you that little bit more noticed by Google etc and realizing that it was a free and easy marketing tool I took the plunge.
It does take a little getting used to (all the techy side of things) and admittedly its not the only marketing you should do but I can see the benefits. You also get back what you put in; when you post about other great products, people or sites, others will do the same about you. You also get great instant feedback about your products, from people who don’t have to like it (like your family and friends!)
Thanks for the great post – as always.
Justine
Yes, you know my thoughts on FB. I loathe it. I wish twitter and facebook would merge in a creative way as there is way too much junk to read and ingest. FB also has a terrible interface and no design plus the fact that you can get caught up going in 10 million directions wastes time.
What an excellent post, and very interesting comments. It’s funny how we all, to varying degrees, have an aversion to social networking sites. (I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t get Twitter). And at the same time, it’s incredibly important to reach out to our potential customers where they “meet” as it were. It’s impossible to engage in conversation with someone if you are there by yourself.
I think consistency in posting to whatever social media we choose is also important. My potential customers aren’t people that I want to forget about or throw aside. I like to think of treating them like my good friends: People I enjoy interacting with on a regular basis. I know if I just ignored my friends, we probably wouldn’t be friends for long…
On another note, in response to Karen’s request for streamlined posting; Yes! There ARE ways to make one post and have it appear in multiple places. (Hooray for technology!) I don’t use any of them (I know that I should), but 2 that I have heard good things about from multiple sources:
http://ping.fm/
and
http://hootsuite.com/
Hope this helps!
Thanks Daniella! I ran right over to hootsuite and signed up. I tried to connect to facebook, and it went directly to my personal page, but I’d rather like to connect it to my fan page not my personal page for the business usage. How do you connect it to that page and not your personal page?
I totally hate fb. I set up the fan page and trying to get people over there as a fan is torture. With everyone asking me, what’s the difference is between fan and friend? It’s a contest of who can get the most friends from all over the world. I guess that’s cool, but it doesn’t do me any good. I don’t have the time to sit on a computer all day to cultivate these virtual people and the outcome is to have their onslaught of minutia. I should disconnect the personal page as Ink & Wit said, the mindless cycle of what people do when they get up and what they do before going to bed is mind numbing to me. I’m not really into that at all, I’d rather just get the holiday newsletter about the family’s year’s events in their Christmas card ONCE a year, not every day, times a million!
Twitter is WAY better in getting your thoughts across in a short sentence because it isn’t filled with all the clutter that fb is that you can easily be distracted by and lose an hour. You can make a statement, add a tiny url and it drives people to the business of what you have to offer. In and out in a minute. It seems to have more movers and shakers in business.
Facebook is who you went to high school with. Twitter is who you WISH you went to high school with.
I also got burned out on Facebook and deleted my profile two years ago, BUT…I have a business facebook page! It’s entirely different and not as annoying. For one thing, it’s about the business and not about you specifically. That means you don’t get the same kinds of gifting and other things related to the personal Facebook pages. In fact, if you don’t want to talk about yourself specifically, you don’t have to. You can make the page about your business and the items you sell. You can also start discussion pages related to trends and generate conversations. This can provide valuable feedback for what folks are looking for. Facebook also makes it easy to insert a link right on your website- this is assuming that your website is enabled for HTML edits- otherwise you’ll have to list the URL as text.
I think I might have to disagree with you (in a way) just this once. I think if you hate one of these networks, you aren’t going to have as much fun with it–and fun is infectious (and authentic). Megan, I can tell you LOVE this blog, so this is where I follow you. You have fun with it, respond to comments and feel relaxed and in control.
Some brands I love – I can tell they just love interacting on Twitter, so that is where I tend to follow them, even though they might have Fan Pages or blogs, I seem to be drawn to their most authentic and organic conversations.
Plus, don’t most of us have blog, tumblr, flickr, facebook, twitter, kaboodle (etc etc) accounts – and not just one? My advice is to have a presence on as many as possible (within reason) but rock the ones you enjoy the most.
This post is very thought-provoking and I love the comments. There’s an old adage that says “Don’t rely on your friends or family for business” or something like that. I’ve found that to be true, therefore, Facebook leaves me cold. My cousins or my friends from high school aren’t going to flock to my Etsy shop. I’m going to use the business page of Facebook and focus on that. And my blog. And maybe, in the future, Twitter.
good point — if marketing was only what we “wanted” to do — it would be practically nothing (at least for me!) — I do think we should put our efforts into areas we enjoy a little bit…
Here’s what’s funny- those of us who mostly use email to communicate are now considered old fashioned! Social media have overtaken email as a primary online form of communication! This means us ‘old timers’ have to adapt to what the young-uns are doing by becoming visible via Web 2.0. That doesn’t mean we have to change ourselves- just communicate about ourselves in different ways. But the old ways of handling ourselves on the Internet won’t make ourselves visible like they used to.