WHY TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT?
At Squeegee & Ink, we use social media as our main marketing tool to target our audience worldwide. We have well over 100,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok alone resulting in an engaged audience that we can learn from and build on.
TIP 1: ORGANIC IS BEST
We would rather have 100 engaged followers than 10,000 absent followers. We believe that the only way to gain a solid following is to slowly grow your audience organically.
Sure you could pay for a larger following but why bother? Followers aren’t sales, followers are people who you can communicate with and learn from. If you fill your social channels up with bots and fake accounts, how can you grow your business on that foundation?
TIP 2 : LEARN WHO YOUR CUSTOMER IS
If you can understand who your customer is, you can target them directly. Start posting things that your customer may find interesting rather than the first thing that comes to mind.
Learn which social channels they spend most of their time on. Think about their search terms and adapt your hashtags accordingly.
Understanding this information can gain a highly valuable follower which you will then have the opportunity to engage with.
TIP 3: BUILD YOUR BIO LIKE A BOSS
Now you know who your target audience is, build your bio around this information. Make it easy to understand and add a call to action – website or alternative.
Another quick tip on this subject – if you are planning on using either Facebook or Twitter, don’t use text in your banner image. Trust me! We found out the hard way!
TIP 4: POST YOUR PROCESS
You are creative! So use that to your advantage! As a guess, I would assume you are a screen printer or creative entrepreneur because of your passion for your process. Well how about you portray your passion rather then your price.
Followers are people! In general, people don’t care about a product that you are throwing in their face… but they do care about the background story, the person behind the brand and even understanding how something is produced.
TIP 5: FORGET GOING VIRAL
Going viral is fun, however it’s not essential. We consider ‘going viral’ to be anything over 1 million views on a single post.
From our experience we have found that we generally gain around 5,000 new followers every time we go viral on Instagram and around 10,000 new followers on TikTok. BUT most of these followers aren’t actually interested in screen printing, they just enjoyed that one video.
What we have found is that when you gain a huge following very quickly, this stunts your normal growth rate for a chunk of time. During this time it can be difficult to gauge what posts are doing well and which ones are below average. You have to wait for the new followers to work out if they actually like your content and want to keep committing their time to you.
BONUS TIP: F*CK THE ALGORITHM!
Yeah that’s right, f*ck the algorithm! I could tell you everything we know about the algorithm, however that information may change tomorrow. So what is the point?!
I truly believe that no one actually knows exactly how to work the algorithm. There are ideas and good practices available but unless you programmed it and it’s constant updates, how would you ever know for sure?
Instead of trying to work out a very complicated algorithm, how about focusing your attention on the newest features on a social app. For example, Instagram recently poured a lot of money into ‘Reels’ – maybe they might want more people to use it too? Just a thought… Oh and a couple of hashtags cant hurt either!
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Check out our Social Media Masterclass for Screen Printers and Creatives.
