What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is an outline or plan of your social media goals, how you will achieve them, and how you’ll track metrics.
Social is talked about all the time in business, but do you need it? If yes, then how will you use it? This episode is all about finding out what is right for your business.
Why having a presence on social media is important for small businesses:
- Maintains and builds relationships with customers you already have
- Grows brand awareness and familiarity
- Builds trust with new and current customers
- Builds engaged communities
- Turns customers into advocates (gain mentions, comments, likes, tags, etc.)
- Gives your business a chance to respond to any negative feedback
- Another channel to promote products or services
How to set up a strategy
- Determine a goal – make sure it’s measurable/realistic for your business (ex: increasing email sign ups, increase web traffic, generate sales/leads, etc). Understanding and researching your competition can help you.
- Understand your audience – Know the basics about your target audience like age, location, income, interests, etc. Which can all be found using that platform’s analytics tool. This can help you build better strategies and goals based off that data. Also know things like what kind of content do your customers engage with? What accounts do your customers follow? What do they like/share?
- Get to know your competition – Complete a competitive analysis to help you understand what your competitors are doing, what their strengths/weaknesses are. Or keep an eye on their pages, search relevant keywords and how your competitors rank, etc.
Start Implementing Your Strategy
- Determine which platforms you want to use and are relevant to you (Instagram for reels, TikToks for short videos, Facebook for customer service, etc)
- Set up your profiles (use consistent branding like logos and brand colors, fill out bio completely, use high-quality images, include keywords people may associate your business with, etc)
- Create a social media calendar to help organize content ideas, scheduled posts, and maintain consistency
- Have your first couple of posts planned out and ready to go live
Who are you selling to? What is your niche?
- Should social media be a place for you to sell, or just display your products?
- What would you be able to show off?
- What do you WANT to do on social media?
Learn about your potential audience / customers
- Does your audience make purchasing decisions from social media?
- Can you reasonably work with your customers or influencers to promote your product?
- Which platforms make sense for your business?
Research your competition or other similar businesses
- What are they doing?
- Do you want to do what they’re doing or something different?
Determine your strategy
- Do you want to sell online?
- Do you want to have customers find you on social?
- Are your pages for building trust?
- Are your pages just an online portfolio?
Define your brand
- What do you want to look like?
- What is the personality of your brand?
- Who is your audience?
Set up accounts / profiles
- Images
- Descriptions
- Initial Posts
Create a social media calendar
- When will you post?
- What will you post?
- Will you go live?
Collaborate with others
- Engage with people in comments
- Connect with customers on their social accounts
- Cross-promote when possible
- Follow and connect with potential influencers
Experiment with new ways to engage
- Contests
- Ask opinions (This or that? Which is your fav?)
- Boost posts (pay to get more views)
- Do you have customers that can promote your pages?
- e.g. if you work with a school maybe do a # contest for free swag
- e.g. if you work with another small business, cross-promote each other or share a contest. “Win X from me and Y from them.”
Track performance
- BE PATIENT
- Look for interesting wins
- Try to re-create what has worked before
Extra Social Media Tips/ Ideas
After your social media accounts are created, keep a few things in mind:
- Experiment with style of content: Post polls, stories, contests, cross collaborations (mention nails), boost posts, customer success stories.
- Don’t post too much or too little. One can seem annoying and overbearing while the other can seem lazy or like the brand doesn’t care.
- Get your team on social media, which helps with keeping track of any messages, mentions, or comments.
- Search popular hashtags/ keywords to use in written and video posts.
Using Social Media for business isn’t just as simple as posting cool pictures and getting a million followers. People who have ‘gone viral’ as a rule didnt get there by accident. They spent a ton of time interacting with the platform, creating content, posting like crazy and working hard.
Make a smart business decision on how YOUR business will use social media and go for it!
Transcript
Marc Vila:
Welcome to episode 188 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila. And today I’m here with Jes Santiago.
Jes Santiago:
Hello.
Marc Vila:
Hi. And Jes is on the ColDesi marketing team with us, and she’s been with the company, with ColDesi over two years now, work in marketing. So tell us, before we get into the podcast too much, just tell us a little bit about what you do, what you’ve done over the years.
Jes Santiago:
Sure. So I started with ColDesi as a E-commerce marketing assistant, and I just kind of dove right in into E-commerce tasks, which was something I was pretty much completely unfamiliar with. But I did that for about a year. So everything that had to do with Colman and Company.com, our supply site, I was in charge of getting product photos, product descriptions, getting new products launched on the website, things like that. And then I took a different direction, and now I am senior content specialist. So now I kind of am more in charge of creating content, planning our video calendar, any written content that goes up on any of our sites, I try to get behind. And pretty much just helping us get as much content as possible up on our sites is pretty much what I do.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And then the final bit of that is really what this podcast is about today. And that’s social media.
Jes Santiago:
Yes.
Marc Vila:
So Jes has been a huge part in growing and changing and adapting the ColDesi and our other brands social media accounts. So today’s podcast, episode 188 is called Setting Up Your Social Media Strategy. And this is important, because if you’re starting a new business, right, you think, “I need to be on social media.” Right? Or you’ve heard of people selling a ton of T-shirts or hats through social media, and are you going to do that? And how are you going to do that? And are you going to go viral or go on TikTok live, or are you going to bother with it at all? Right? So I think it’s a pretty confusing landscape, don’t you think?
Jes Santiago:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that it’s a balance as well of kind of what you plan on doing on social media, and sometimes it’s even as… You kind of get lucky, you know, go viral one time and you may not ever go viral again. So there’s just a couple different things you can do to make sure your business has a presence on social media and it can become really difficult.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So kind of going into this a little bit, we’re going to talk about how you develop a strategy, how you implement that. And then you’ll also, yeah, I mean, you’re going to deal with a little bit of luck every once in a while, but if you do things correctly with a plan, you’re going increase your chances of lucky things happening to you.
Jes Santiago:
Exactly.
Marc Vila:
Right?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
So if you don’t play the lottery, then you can never win it, right? And that’s kind of one extreme of how it goes, but it’s true. If you’re not doing anything on social media, then nobody’s ever going to find you there and become your customer.
Jes Santiago:
Exactly.
Marc Vila:
So before we get into that, can you guess when I’m drinking in this cup right here?
Jes Santiago:
Probably knowing you, a Monster or some type of energy drink.
Marc Vila:
That’s pretty close. Monster Java.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, you do like those. I’ve never had one before.
Marc Vila:
I love it. And I’m also writing with a Waldorf Astoria pen. So there’s some juxtaposition between drinking Java Monster and using a Waldorf pen. But I think that’s the breath of our customers and listeners on Custom Apparel Startups, we have all types of folks. So I got to be relatable.
Jes Santiago:
Exactly. I’m just being boring and I’m sipping my iced coffee.
Marc Vila:
From where?
Jes Santiago:
Foxtail.
Marc Vila:
Foxtail?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. It’s a honey lavender.
Marc Vila:
Honey. Oh my gosh. So new age.
Jes Santiago:
It’s really fancy. It really is new age.
Marc Vila:
All right, well, speaking of new age things, this social media thing, all right. So when we’re talking about strategy on social media, I’ll start with kind of step one. And the first thing you have to really think about, which what you’re going to do is talk about who are you selling to? What’s your niche? And the reason why I’d say this is so important is because if your niche are the type of folks that are going to make decisions on social media, buy things from there, go to social media to make purchasing decisions, then you’re probably going to want to take one strategy. Versus if your customers are likely to not make any decision on social media, then it might not matter necessarily as much for you to get really deep into becoming a mini social media superstar in your business. So and I have a couple in mind, but, Jes, can you think of any examples of maybe a customer who might make a purchasing decision on social media and ones that might not?
Jes Santiago:
Like the type of person are you saying?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or maybe the type of product you’re selling even or whatever. Do you have any thoughts?
Jes Santiago:
So immediately when you asked me that, I thought of the type of person. And I know understanding your audience has to do with some purchasing decisions, their age. I think that plays a really huge role in whether or not they’re going to purchase from social media. I think that if you were selling a product or a service and your target audience happens to be maybe an older crowd, I don’t think that they trust that they can purchase from social media. They don’t trust the technology, if that makes sense, versus your younger customers. Or if you’re selling something, a product or a service that’s geared towards a younger audience, I can say for myself, we’re more likely to… I’ll buy something off of Instagram.
Marc Vila:
Right. Okay.
Jes Santiago:
I can have that trust through Instagram. The older crowd’s not really going to have that. That’s kind of the first thing I thought about. When thinking about what kind of product, that can go a bunch of different ways.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, I’ve got a thought.
Jes Santiago:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
I’ve got a thought. So if your customers are typically going to be folks who are purchasing uniforms for schools, if they’re purchasing all of the T-shirts for the folks that work in a warehouse, if it’s just maybe people who own small businesses that are a little more in the boring business world, if mortgage brokers, and insurance agents, and stuff like that, and maybe even on the contractor world like plumbers, and electricians, and things like that. So if that’s your niche, they’re probably not going to be say, “Oh, I need to order T-shirts for my business. I’m going to go ahead and go to Instagram real quick and try to find somebody and then find their Instagram store and purchase something from there.” Right?
They want to do business with somebody who’s going to be professional, helpful, offer good customer service, hopefully deliver it in a quick timeframe. Somebody that they can pick it up directly from and see and talk about the style of shirt that they want to wear. The electrician might say, “I’m up in attics and in crawl spaces, I want something that I’m not going to get all sweaty and moisture wicking shirt.” They’re going to want to have those conversations.
On the flip side of things, if you’re selling fashion or maybe you’re selling directly to students at a school, so it’s not necessarily that you’re just going through the person who works in the main office, but you’re dealing with actually having a social presence to sell directly to the students where they can buy hats and other type of school swag you. So those are going to be two different scenarios where how much selling on social media matters or not.
Jes Santiago:
Right.
Marc Vila:
So I mean, that’s obviously getting into the weeds, but that’s the concept of understanding who your customers are and what they do. And I think there’s another question too, to be asked once you ask who you’re selling to, what your niche is, what’s your business? But do you want to be on social media, right? Why do you think that’s important?
Jes Santiago:
I mean, I think there’s a few different reasons why a business would want to be on social media, especially maybe even a smaller business, for example. I mean, that’s where you can maintain and build relationships with customers you may already have. This is a way for you to grow brand awareness and have people become familiar with your brand. You can turn customers… If it starts going well, you can turn customers kind of into advocates where they’ll mention you if they have a good experience, maybe even show off what they bought from you, a product or even a service. They’ll mention you, they’ll tag you, they’ll like your posts, share your posts, kind of builds engaged communities.
And then on the flip side, it also just, if a customer has a negative experience and you’re not on social media, you don’t really get to mend that relationship. That’s a missed opportunity in my opinion. So those are just a few ways or reasons why I think someone or a small business would want to join social media to be able to build these communities, be able to respond to any negative feedback that people might have that you’re just missing.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s actually a really good point that if somebody is upset with something that happened that they potentially are going to go to Facebook or anywhere and post about it or say something and directly potentially message you or tag you and it gives you the opportunity to respond. Maybe you didn’t even know they were upset. So that’s something good.
And another about wanting to be on social media, I think is great is having a live public platform that’s a conglomerate of all the work that you do, a portfolio. And then I think the one thing about do you want to be on social media? That’s kind of the business decision. But then there’s a personal decision of if you don’t fee… If you’re not into it to be an online personality, then there’s a degree of authenticity that’s important for social. So if you don’t want do it and you’re trying to force it, everyone’s going to know you’re trying to force it and then nobody’s going to want to watch, or follow, or share, or look.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I think it’s important to make sure that your team wants to be on social media as well.
Marc Vila:
So anyone else that works with you. And yeah, I mean, it’s all about the plans that you have, right? So if you want to take footage of people running equipment or something like that, or having people talk about the products that you’re selling, whether it’s just you and your husband or wife, or if you have employees, you have to figure out what are the lines you want to draw on that. So I think that kind of… We’ve done part one and part two a little bit here, right?
So we talked a bit about, who are you selling to? What’s the niche product? Who’s your audience, right? What kind of products do you sell? How important is social presence for those? So it doesn’t matter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, how important is having that there? And then the potential audience that you have and how they’re going to expect it?
So I would say, I think of kind of two extremes on social media. And that’s going to be… And you just have to figure out which one is best for you. On a personal note, what do you want to do? And then on a secondary note of, what does the business, what would benefit the business the most as an entity?
So the one extreme would be you just create the two most popular, Facebook and Instagram, and you post pictures, maybe videos of stuff that you make. And that’s it. That’s all it’s designed for, it’s an online portfolio. This way if you meet somebody, you’re at a party and someone says, “What do you do?” “I make T-shirts.” And they say, “Oh, cool. Let me see.” You don’t necessarily have to go to your photo album where you’ve got mixed in pictures of drink that you had at the bar and your dinner somewhere-
Jes Santiago:
Or reach in your pocket for your business card. Then they’ve got to go to the website on the business card to see your stuff. It’s an easier way to display what you’re doing with your business.
Marc Vila:
Right. Yeah. “Hey, do you have Instagram? Yeah. Go to it, type in whatever T-shirt shop.” And then they’ll pull it up, and yeah, follow me. And then also they can just see everything that you’ve done. And it looks really cool. It’s a reasonably passive. You could also do the same thing on Facebook. So this does two things. It allows you to share your portfolio in a good way. And it also allows any potential buyers from you that are maybe trying to do a little bit of online research will find your Instagram page, see 100 things that you’ve made, and they say, “Okay, this person knows what they’re doing.” Right?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
So I think those are the extremes. You try to become an online personality and you’re literally wearing and selling hats on TikTok through… Or the Instagram store. And then the other extreme is just like, it’s an online portfolio. And then the third option is having nothing at all, which is I’m going to generally speaking, advocate not for that.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that it builds trust with customers and potential customers if you’re not keeping up… I mean, this is how I think at my age, I’m sure there’s other people a little bit even younger than me, like Jailin who’s on our team could agree that if you don’t see that a customer’s keeping up with anything new age, so any newer technologies perhaps, or any of the social media platforms, you kind of start to maybe think a little bit, “Maybe I won’t purchase for them. Maybe I can purchase from someone who’s more on top of things, more willing to show me what they’re doing on a live.” You can even do a live story. Things like that I think are important for a small business or just a business of any size.
Marc Vila:
So some customers are going to want to see that you’re keeping up to date with things. They’re going to want to see that you’re moving forward because they’re moving forward too. And they would like to work… Listen, if our school or small business, we’re growing small business and if we’re going to need to try to partner up with somebody to do the custom apparel that we’re going to have for not only our customers, but also our employees, we want to make sure that they’re forward moving with us too. And we don’t want to be stuck with somebody who’s going to stay behind while moving forward.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.
Marc Vila:
So I can see that. I mean, there’s definitely a vision going forward of people deciding who they’re going to do business with. Also, they’re going to be curious if you’re real or not.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Authenticity for sure.
Marc Vila:
They also might think you’re a scam.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree.
Marc Vila:
Which is a real thing too.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.
Marc Vila:
Especially nowadays, there’s so many people with credit card fraud and all these scams everywhere from, I mean, starting with Craigslist scam days, all the way now it’s on Facebook Marketplace, it’s everywhere. Everywhere has somebody trying to scam. So having a social presence is another way to just, it adds another layer of trust. If you don’t have one, that doesn’t mean that you are a scam. And if you do have one, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t, right?
Jes Santiago:
They’re not a scam.
Marc Vila:
But it adds up over time, all the different things. And if they could see that for two years you’ve been posting pictures on various platforms, and some customers have been in those, and maybe they recognize another small business or something that was mentioned in a post in their community, then they’re going to say, “Oh, okay, I didn’t know that you also made the hats, or the shirts, or the mugs for that other business down the road. Actually, I’ve been there before.”
Jes Santiago:
Right. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
“Their stuff looks nice on their employees.” Right?
Jes Santiago:
That’s a good point. I didn’t really think of that, that layer of trust. But I do really think that that’s a good point. I mean, I know for myself, when I’m shopping, if it’s for a small business at least, I do always look up the business on Instagram, Facebook, wherever I can. I’ll try to read through customer comments if any. I don’t see any, that’s a red flag to me on most of their posts. But yeah, I can agree that that’s something that’s super important if you want to make your business not look like a scam.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good point. I’ll say I do the same similarly. For example, I’ll be getting married this spring and-
Jes Santiago:
Congratulations.
Marc Vila:
Thanks. And we were looking at somebody local to make cakes. We really wanted to have a really local, small business do it in our area. And that was the first thing that I did with all the folks that… First, I went on to Facebook into a group, and I asked, “Does anybody know anybody in this area that does this?” And I had maybe 10 people reply, right? Three or four of them actually shared their Instagram page. So I immediately went right to their portfolio.
Jes Santiago:
Love that.
Marc Vila:
So the public was easily able to share their portfolio to me. One of them, I found kind of a website that didn’t have much on it, and I pretty much just bailed on that one immediately.
Jes Santiago:
It’s a red flag.
Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. I was just like, “I don’t know, but I have so many options. I might as well narrow it down to the one that I can already see their work. And there’s a degree of transparency.” So some people immediately got out of the ranking without even me making a phone call. And it’s not like I said, “Oh, they don’t have an Instagram account. I’m not going to do business with them.” That I don’t think that was the thought process at all.
The thought process was, “I’ve got so many that were just recommended to me. I’m only interested in calling three to do price comparisons, to have a conversation. I’m just going to pick the ones that are the three obvious ones for me to make a phone call to.” And the one that had barely had a website and no social media presence, I was just like, my attention was already grabbed by the one that had a tagged local cake made just two weeks ago in a park that was two miles from my house.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I totally get that.
Marc Vila:
So now, right, we’re at the point, we’ve gone in some different places right here, but we’re at the point where we figured out who your customer is, what you’re going to sell to, the potential of what type of social presence you want to have, whether it’s a portfolio or you want to try to sell online based on what you’re trying to do. Next, I would say is going to research your competition or just other similar businesses. They might not be as direct competition as you think, but see what they’re doing.
So one of the thoughts that I had is you want to actually sell online, right? So you decided that you’re going to make real fashion forward type of T-shirts and hats, or maybe you’re going to do even something completely different. You’re going to do custom canvas prints or drinkware that’s really interesting. And you want to sell it actually on social media. Your goal is to not go to a local business like we’ve been discussing a few times, but your goal is actually to get on social, capture people’s attention, and get people actually on Instagram or through TikTok, click a link to buy it right off there or from your website, or something like that. So saying that, you want to see how other people selling similar products, how are they doing it? And if they look like they’re successful, then I mean, one of the key strategies is to just essentially copycat what they’re doing, right?
Jes Santiago:
Basically. Yeah. In so many words. I think that keeping up with what their strengths and weaknesses are, maybe it gives you an opportunity to see what different things you can bring to your social media account. So if you are following, or at least just copycatting a business and it seems to be working for them, you can also branch out and look at their website or their page in a different light as well. Okay, so they’re doing X, Y, Z correctly, but what are they not doing that this other business is doing? You can copy that too and bring that into your business and become those two shops all in one essentially. So basically, I would keep an eye on their pages. That’s what I-
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. I think the perfect scenario would be if you wanted to sell online, just as going with that example is, I want to sell a drinkware that has this custom art that I do. So I’m going to do this custom art, and I’m going to do tumblers, and mugs, and I’m going to customize each of them. All of them are going to be one of a kind. I’m going to offer some that are personalized with names, or birthdays, or anniversaries. Others are just going to be just the art that I sell, and that’s what I’m going to do. And so just the fictional business, I sell the canvases, the drinkware, and maybe even some apparel too with it.
But you’re like, “Well, nobody’s doing this.” Right? That’s the concept. It’s like, “I’m the only person doing this.” Right? So you find people in similar industries or adjacent to it. So if you can find somebody who does hip-hop style, where it’s all has to do with rap lyrics, and dancing, and things like that. Find their page, see what they’re doing, how are they communicating with their audience? How are they talking to them? How are they sharing the product that they sell? How are they taking money accepting money from people?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Marc Vila:
And then it’s not the same as you, but it’s adjacent to you.
Jes Santiago:
Yes.
Marc Vila:
They’re just, what they’re selling is just a completely different audience than yours, right? Yours might be people into art, people who would drink tea or coffee with flowers in it, or something like that.
Jes Santiago:
My lavender coffee. Leave me and my lavender coffee alone.
Marc Vila:
So your customers might drink… And the other customers are drinking Monster coffee drinks.
Jes Santiago:
Monster Java, whatever that is.
Marc Vila:
Right. So saying that, you can just learn some lessons from them. Okay. And then you list what they’re doing. Okay. Well, they’re being live on social media. They’re telling exactly what they’re doing. They’re showing the product being made. They’re inviting customers to join their live with them, and talk about the product, wearing it. And you could say, “I could do that same exact thing.” So you find adjacent customers or adjacent competition that’s not your competition, but very similar. And then you can find direct. And you made a fantastic point where if you find… I would try to find at least three, maybe five or six. Don’t get to 100 or 50, you’ll never be able… Pick a vehicle. And then you Venn diagram it, you draw this is what they do great. This is what they all do great. This is what none of them do great. Here’s this individual idea that I have. And then you pair all that together, and then you build your own little strategy, which is the next thing to talk about, right?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. That’s perfect. What a great segue.
Marc Vila:
So we wrote down, in our notes here, we wrote down some questions about determining a strategy. So why don’t you tell us about what those are?
Jes Santiago:
So the first question is, do you want to sell online? I think we kind of already went over that. Do you want customers to find you on social media? Are these pages for building trust or are they just an online portfolio? Excuse me. So it’s kind of what we’ve already talked about in the same, I don’t know what-
Marc Vila:
Yeah. All the questions we were asking earlier are now need to go into writing.
Jes Santiago:
Yes, exactly. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Marc Vila:
Oh, no, I was just going to say, you go into Excel or Word or something like that that you have, or on a notepad and you physically start answering these questions and writing out level one of, I think of determining a strategy is just right sentences or words, “I want to sell online. My customers are really active on social media. I believe my customers are on TikTok. I don’t think my customers really use Facebook. I think my customers do use Facebook groups a lot. I’d like to find out about actually selling on Instagram. I just want to build a fantastic portfolio so that I can share with people or my customers can share with people that want referrals.”
Jes Santiago:
So basically determining your goal.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, determining the goals, just write them all down. Things you do want, things you don’t want, to keep it simple. And then from there, you can start… I think you’ve got a vision.
Jes Santiago:
Kind of narrow it down. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, yeah. You’ve got a vision of what you want to do, you know what platforms you want to go on, and how you want to execute.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, you know what platforms your customers are going to be on. So that’ll help you choose, okay, I’m going to start on Instagram, or I’m going to start at the basics like Facebook. Maybe you won’t even touch Pinterest, because Pinterest is one that people don’t think about or TikTok just yet. Maybe that can develop over time. But it kind of just helps you determine where you want to put this content and what kind of content you want to put out there, and who’s your audience. So just determining your goal is super important for just starting.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, it’s exactly. It’s just starting. So start somewhere, but have a little bit of a plan of what the start is. Don’t just start making… I read online that if you want to succeed the most, you should have every single social media and post to all of them five times a day.
Jes Santiago:
At this time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, sure. But if your customers are in procurement for local utility companies they’re not even… They don’t care.
Jes Santiago:
I don’t think they’re worried about that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s just so far removed from them making that decision. And have you seen this thing on TikTok where-
Jes Santiago:
I’m scared to know what, TikTok has so much.
Marc Vila:
These people, they have a box of stuff that would be in a junk drawer at your house, and then for 20 bucks, they’ll like scoop a Tupperware full of it and put it in a baggie and mail it to you.
Jes Santiago:
What?
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
Like, what side of TikTok are you on?
Marc Vila:
It’s like it’s pen caps and little squishy toys, and highlighters, clips. Actually, I just had one somewhere. But the chip bag clips.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, the little… Okay.
Marc Vila:
These little twisty tie things.
Jes Santiago:
I’ve never seen that before. That’s interesting.
Marc Vila:
There’s like, oh, here’s a Pokemon toy, and oh, this ones missing an arm.
Jes Santiago:
Oh my God.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s just like a junk drawer.
Jes Santiago:
And they just put it in a bag and sell it to people?
Marc Vila:
And people buy it.
Jes Santiago:
That is so interesting.
Marc Vila:
Right there. Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
Well, I mean, I guess they are saying what’s going in the bag, but there’s a little bit of an element of surprise.
Marc Vila:
There is. And there’s some treasures in there too. This one I was watching, the lady had scratch off tickets that would be in there. So there’d be three scratch off tickets too. And sometimes when there would be a scoop, every once in a while they would get a whole little folded up thing of them. So there was maybe 10 scratch off tickets in there.
Jes Santiago:
OKay. So I can see why people maybe like it.
Marc Vila:
So every once in a while you get a couple really cool looking pens and a Pokemon toy and 10 scratch-offs, and you’re like, “Dang, I could be a millionaire.”
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Or you get a bag that’s like three year old candy or something.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, just old candy.
Jes Santiago:
Or old Chick-Fil-A sauce or something.
Marc Vila:
Just wrappers. I’m pretty sure that might have been in there, ketchup packets and stuff.
Jes Santiago:
Well, I’m thinking of my junk drawer at home and it’s not pretty.
Marc Vila:
So anyway, I think the point being on that is you could sell anything online if it makes sense. This one example is entertaining and there’s some luck involved. And then people are just probably enjoy watching it because it’s just this weird awkward person selling stuff out of a drawer. So in the example of the person who does hip-hop rap type of gear, maybe they have people on their freestyle rapping on their live while they’re selling their stuff. So they’re mixing entertainment. So you find that’s again, that’s the one extreme side of things. Because the other is just online portfolio. So now that you’ve, I guess, we can go back on track after that, going down these TikTok rabbit holes. So let’s see, we have here, so oh, the next important thing that you want to do is defining your brand.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, for sure.
Marc Vila:
Okay, so you want to talk about that a little bit?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. When I think of defining our brand, or just any brand in general, I think about when I’m setting up a page, I want it to be consistent. I want my logos to be in the right places. I want my colors, my business colors to be consistent throughout the page. If I’m going to start a series of how-tos, I want that to look a certain way, be branded a certain way so that when people see that on their, if it’s TikTok, their for you page, or you’re just scrolling through the reels on Instagram, or even on your explore page, if you’ve seen it a few times, if you’ve seen those colors a few times, you know, okay, that’s ColDesi, or okay, that’s Marc’s T-shirt shop, et cetera. So I think having those kind of things, having a personality to your brand, having consistency across the board with logos, colors, I think that’s all important when you’re trying to define your brand, essentially.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. So you-
Jes Santiago:
Make a face for it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You start with the simple level of things. Do you have a logo or is it more like a personality? Is it more your face or is it more about the business? Are there certain colors that you use? Are there certain fonts you use? Are there styles of things and the types of content that you want to share?
Jes Santiago:
Absolutely.
Marc Vila:
So if you’re doing custom drinkware, just using that as an example, you have the name of your company, you have a logo, maybe it’s not personal, right? Your goal is to not sell them necessarily online, but you want to have an online portfolio and a place for your customers to share, say thanks, give reviews, things like that. So you’re going to want to have the logo of your company as the main image in all these places.
If you have any secondary images that can be added to your profile. Maybe it’s a product shop display or something like that, or a picture of your shop, or something like that, or of you working, or something like that. And then the types of posts that you want to have for your branding.
So in this example, I just want to have really three types of posts. One is going to be something interactive, maybe to try to get some interaction online. Another one’s just going to be actual pictures of finished products. And then the third type of post is maybe either going to be me making or showing off a finished product. And that’s kind of going to be my social brand, and it’s all going… I’m going to make sure I use the same fonts, the same colors, my logo, take pictures in backgrounds that make sense.
Jes Santiago:
Right. Yes.
Marc Vila:
Right? Yeah. So when somebody goes to your page, everything feels like it belongs to you.
Jes Santiago:
Exactly. Yeah. You want your page to be, I mean, as cohesive, I think, as possible. I mean, you can have fun with it I believe. Even on our pages, one day we’re doing something with sublimation that’s super colorful, and then the next day we’re doing an embroidery design, digital heat effects design. Doesn’t always have to be so structured and so uniform. I don’t want to have people think by saying you want consistency, that has to be a certain uniform kind of way to where it almost becomes boring.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be militant either, where it’s like, I cannot break from this.
Jes Santiago:
Yes. I think it’s important to test, don’t be afraid to test. I think we do that all the time. For a while, we found that just normal social media or Instagram posts, for example, just pictures were working for a while. And then as you scroll up to our most recent, we’ve moved on to reels. So I think that it’s just important to test as long as it makes sense for your business, and as long as you’re still making sure that you have the same kind of face, the same kind of familiarity for customers and potential customers to find you, then you’re on the right track.
Marc Vila:
Yep. And this is a great place to go and look at other brands, whether it’s competition or just any brand in general, any business as on social media that you think does a good job. When one does a good job, you know it when you see it. And sometimes it’s hard to explain. So when you see one that does a good job, try to write down notes about why. I always find that their brand color is pink, and almost every picture has that shade of pink in it somewhere. Whether it’s literally a scarf on the table next to the product or the product itself. So look for things like that. So let’s see, make sure we have here your brand. Yeah. So your brand is all about, what do you want it to look like? Who is going to look at it? What’s the personality of your brand? And just making sure that your whole business on social media is cohesive and makes sense.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Which I think brings us into setting up your account. It kind of just flows into that, making sure that you have high quality images. You’re not just going to throw up a photo that you took, I don’t know, just randomly, you know. You want to make sure that you have some kind of, I guess, process to it. Make sure you have high quality images. Make sure you’re including keywords in your descriptions, in your bio, I think is important. Any links, if you have a Linktree, that’s also really something that we found pretty cool to use as well. Any initial posts you want to have scheduled at first, kind of have a plan, write out a plan. All right, so I’m going to start with reels. I’m going to do this in day one, or post one, two, three, four, five. I think all of these are important in setting up, kick starting your social media business or portfolio.
Marc Vila:
And so, no, that’s a great point. And you brought up something about testing too, which we’re going to get into next again as well. But so what you do is you hit the button on Instagram to start a new page, right? And then just start going through the steps. And before you hit publish, make sure you take notes of everything that they want you to fill out.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, good point.
Marc Vila:
Right. So they want you to make a name, they want you to have an image, they want you to have a secondary image, write a description of who you are and make your first post. So write all that down. That’s what I need to start Instagram. And to future-proof this, it might be different in one month. So rather than listing exactly what it is, the best tool you can do is actually to start to pretend to set one up, even if it’s a dummy one that you never publish and just hit delete at the end, or cancel.
The same thing on any other account that you’re going to do. Start to go through some of the steps so you can figure out what it is. Or potentially even just research on YouTube, how to set up an Instagram account the best way. And be sure to sort your video by the most recent in case there’s any changes. But you want to make a list of everything that you want to do, look back at your plan, make sure that what you have is going to make sense to it. Look at how you’re going to do your branding. And once you’re all set up and planned, then you can make your page. But before you do it, you should probably work on a bit of a social media calendar.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I actually have that in my notes. I think without a calendar, I can’t imagine, for example, I can’t imagine working here and not having a social media calendar. And that’s for all three of the platforms that we use, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It just helps with consistency, making sure that you’re consistently posting, making sure that it’s going out on time.
I don’t want to say, “Okay, we’re going to print a design on one of our machines for St. Patrick’s Day.” Oh, well it’s already the 16th. I got to hurry up and get this post up. It’s kind of too late. You want to be ahead of the game. So for example, for that, we started creating content for that this month. And well, just kidding. It’s the 1st of March. So I forgot. In February-
Marc Vila:
Yeah, we did it last month. Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, we did it last month. And you just kind of start scheduling and getting ahead of the game so that it also just doesn’t… It doesn’t create, you don’t have to just go in all on one day and post, post, post, create all these posts. You have things kind of scheduled out what you’re going to do, you know what you’re going to film. It just makes the process easier. I couldn’t imagine just not having a calendar and working willy-nilly just, oh, I’ll post this. Oh, I’ll post that.
Marc Vila:
Right. You just want to have a plan. You want to have a daily, weekly, monthly type of a plan. And I would say currently, March 1st, 2023, if you’re listening to this a decade in the future, the AI’s deciding everything. Okay.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Excuse me.
Marc Vila:
It also decided that you should be listening to this podcast from the distant past. But today, I would say if it’s an online portfolio, have the schedule to post something to social media, bare minimum once a week. Two to three times a week ideally, right? But at least once a week, preferably twice, this way at the end of the year, there’s 100 things up there, right? If you’re doing it about twice a week, at the end of the year, you’ve got 100 pictures on Instagram, which is a pretty nice thing for a year later down the road when a customer says, “Yeah, purchase from so-and-so shop. They did a great job for me.” And they link to your Instagram account and this stranger on social media who you don’t even know, that you don’t even know this is happening, clicks on it, and they see 100 things that you’ve made. And they’re like, “This person’s legit. They’re good.”
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Exactly. Going back to the beginning where you were saying you were picking out wedding cakes, you didn’t go for the business that barely had a website built out that barely had a presence on social media. Yeah, you could do the minimum posting, but I mean, I don’t want to look at an Instagram page, a TikTok page that has two, three Instagram… Or two posts, four posts, five posts, even 10. I’m like…
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
They seem brand new. I don’t know if I necessarily trust… I want to put my trust into a brand new wedding cake bakery or something.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s actually… And that brings up a point, and it’s something, maybe not… I mean, it could be a tangent we could go into, but what you described of having in the beginning when you’re setting it up, having some posts that you’re going to do ahead of time, ready to go. So when you start your page, it’s not blank, but at least when you’re starting it, you’ve got maybe five things ready to go up or 10 things. And then talking about posting on a regular basis. That’s actually one of the biggest challenges I think for all businesses. They say, even us, “What are we going to post this week?” So I would say this, on your busy weeks with business where you’ve got a lot of orders, you should be taking a picture and or video of every order. You don’t have to post all of those that week.
Put them in the bank, put them in the folder. And then when you have a moment and you’re going to look at your social media real quick, line them up, say, “Order one, I’m going to do on Tuesday, order two, Thursday order three, next Tuesday, order four, next Thursday.” And now you’ve got six weeks worth of stuff kind of written down. And you know what you’re going to post. And you can schedule posts on a lot of these platforms too. So you can schedule to release it at a later date. And you can also change it. So if you have a really… Oops, I just threw my pen somewhere. If you have a really interesting-
Jes Santiago:
Got it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I got it. If you have a really interesting customer that comes up, you can alter your schedule a little bit. Hey, you guys are doing a big event this weekend. I’ll advertise it on my Instagram so people can see. And then you just move that post two weeks later, right? So if you have a bunch of stuff in the bank, you’ll always have a bunch of posts to do. So take advantage of things. And it’s okay to share the same thing at a different angle, or from a different light, or from share making it on Tuesday and then the next Tuesday share the finished product as a follow-up post. There’s plenty of content you could do, and especially on the portfolio side. If you’re going to be selling online, you probably want to have a daily plan.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, for sure.
Marc Vila:
What are you going to do every single day? Are you going to be going live every day? Are you going to be posting every day? What are you going to be offering every day? And that’s going to make sure that when your customer is ready to make that decision, you’re there ready to take the order.
Jes Santiago:
They’re choosing your page, your business.
Marc Vila:
Okay. So we’ve got a calendar, and then there’s a couple more things to go over. One is going to be kind of what you mentioned earlier. I wrote in the notes here, collaborating with others, but you know, also said community involvement and things like that.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. So I know for one, something that we’ve benefited from is our Facebook groups. There’s kind of a community on our Custom Apparel Startups page where we try to be on top of everything, but we’re also busy doing our own tasks. We cannot always reach every comment. There’s a community there that if you’ve built a big enough page built a big enough community, someone else who is familiar, or knows the answer, or can help one of our other customers, they jump on it. I see all the time in our page. And you kind of build cold SE customers who just help each other out when we’re not there for them or we can’t be there necessarily.
Marc Vila:
Sometimes I’ve seen on customer pages where they’ll say on their social media, it’ll say, “Do y’all make hoodies?” And then another customer will comment and say, “Yes, I actually just got some from them. I love them.” So that’s that community that you’ve created. But what you need to do is you need to help facilitate the creation of that community. And that’s going to be by asking your customers to follow you, asking your customers to maybe leave a review or comment or say, “Hey, I’m going to post the pictures of the hats I made for you on my Instagram.” And just I’d say, just be honest, “I’m trying to grow it. And Instagram kind of gives me Instagram points when people comment and like it, so if you wouldn’t mind when I post it up there, if you wouldn’t mind commenting and liking on it.”
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, sharing it to your story.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or share it. That’d be a big help to me. And I’d appreciate it. So you could just ask folks that, and then anytime somebody does comment or anything like that on any of your posts, be sure to respond. Respond to all of them if you can. And in the beginning, in the very beginning, you definitely can, because there’s not going to be that many. So respond to that. And then another way to kind of build that online community is by cross-promoting. So if you have a customer who is an electrician, you made hats for them, post their hat, tag them in there, write a note, “Hey, if anybody is in the Harbordale area, you need an electrician. I just did a hat job for Joe over there and he was a super cool guy.” And either drop the name of their business or if they have social media, share their social media.
And maybe this electrician, he’s on social media too, kind of sharing his customer’s stories. And potentially ask them, say, “I’m going to share you, will you share me?” And it could be them doing a job wearing the new hats and be like, “Hey, we just fixed the electrical issue at this local school, and by the way, we’re wearing our new hats. And even one of the kids in the school commented how cool it looked.” Whatever. So cross promoting each other like that’s great, especially when you’re dealing with lots of other businesses or if you are doing work with somebody who is really active on social media themselves.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, for sure. So I just thought of something on another way to build your, I guess, community or gain followers, but it doesn’t necessarily have to… I’m backtracking a little bit if that’s okay.
Marc Vila:
All right. Cool.
Jes Santiago:
Doesn’t necessarily have to do with cross-promoting, but going back to knowing your competitors. I think one of the things that I have found helpful, and I sometimes go through our competitors or someone adjacent to us, their followers. Who are they following? I mean, I’m not going to just follow a random person named Bob who has no post. But if it seems like another shop or something that is relevant to our business, I’ll go ahead and I’ll follow. I’ll pay attention.
Marc Vila:
So you potentially follow the followers of your competition or adjacent businesses.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, so if you sell apparel and there’s a shop down the road that sells awards and engraving, kind of adjacent, right? Because you figure that a little league is going to use both of those businesses, right? They need awards and they need apparel. And maybe both of you might not do the same thing.
So what you do is you can go to this award shop and you can look at their social media. It’s pretty good. They got a good amount of people there. It’s adjacent to my business. Who’s following them? Well there’s three little league teams that are following them. So I’m going to click on their profiles, look at them, and then right from my business profile, I’m going to follow that little league. It’s going to pop up that this custom apparel shop follows them.
And that little moment there could be the spark that ignites them to look at you, see how good of a job you do, realize how dissatisfied they are with the apparel that they currently have potentially, didn’t even know you were in business. They found you. And that they start following you back. And next thing you know, the next time that their customer messes up or their vendor messes up and gets the hats wrong again for the third time, they’re going to-
Jes Santiago:
It’s a light bulb.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, and they’re going to remember you and they’re going to have seen how good your hats look. And they pick up the phone and they give you a call, or even send you a message on social media and say, “Hey, I’m sick of doing with this business that doesn’t seem to care about me. I’m looking for somebody who does. And looking at your social media, it seems like you care about your customers.” So a little bit of this work that you can do in social can really pay off.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Even with influencers, influencers, influencers, tongue-tied. Influencers, you can also follow some influencers that are maybe a little bit popular in the type of industry you’re working in and maybe try to connect with them as well. It’s another way to build brand trust on social media. If this social media influencer is doing this, I should do this. There’s a lot of people that think that way. We’re easily, maybe not easily, but some of us are easily influenced to trust what this influencer, this popular influencer is saying. We see them all the time. We see bigger brands partnering with them. So maybe trying to connect with even some of the smaller ones.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, just honestly, and influencers can be on the social media side, meaning they have tons of followers, right? But it also could mean that they’re just an influencer in your community. So the amount of followers they have is maybe very small, maybe 400, but they are the principal of a school, or they are the person who is the head of the homeowner’s association. So the people that are following them are actually a lot of people in your community. And if you’re interacting with them online, they associate you with this person that is of authority, that they trust and it can turn into business for you. So there’s one side of it where it’s like, yes, I’m going to connect with this person who’s in the music industry that has a million followers, that would be great for my business. But that might not really matter too much to you if you’re mainly selling to local stuff.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.
Marc Vila:
Right. What would matter more to you would be principals, politicians, business owners like-
Jes Santiago:
That big face in the community.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. The realtor that has their face on every billboard as you’re driving down-
Jes Santiago:
On the bench.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, the bench bench man.
Jes Santiago:
I haven’t seen that in a while actually.
Marc Vila:
I don’t drive by a lot of benches too much.
Jes Santiago:
Me either now that I think about it. Otherwise, maybe I just don’t notice. I don’t know.
Marc Vila:
I just don’t drive in the city as much.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, true. I try to avoid.
Marc Vila:
I live in the suburbs now and I drive on the highway to get through it, so I don’t see the benches.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Well, all right. There’s two last things to discuss and then we’re about to wrap up. So you had mentioned before just about experimenting with new ways to engage.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, absolutely.
Marc Vila:
So what are some ways you can experiment? And by engage, we mean getting people to follow you, like you, make comments, message you, whatever it is, that means interact with you.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Do you have any thoughts of ways to experiment things you could try?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I actually did this holiday contest on Instagram and that was kind of a first, I think. Or either maybe a second for us. We did that for the second time, but years apart. So I think contests are a good way to try and get people to engage with you, click on your page, click on your website. You’re going to need some patience though, especially if you’re starting off. You’re a little bit newer on social media.
For us, we did it on our Colman and Company Instagram page, which has a little bit less of a following than ColDesi, and Digital Heat Effects. And it took a little bit for the post to pick up. But once I started sharing that contest, once I sent it to people, I even went ahead and sent it to my own friends that I know make their own T-shirts or hats. They shared it to a bunch of different people. And that’s how we got that page or that post to pick up a little bit. Then the comment section was crazy. People were tagging all of their friends trying to win our contest. So I would say maybe try with contests, polls.
Marc Vila:
Ask people their opinion.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Exactly.
Marc Vila:
I’m thinking about adding a new… Drinkware example. Before you put art on tumblers and you kind of say, “Which one of these should be the next one I put on my website?” And ask the people that follow you. And the contest one is interesting. You can do something for a free giveaway, or coupon, or something like that. There’s plenty, you can experiment with working with an influencer like the cross posting, see how that works if you cross post with this person and if it makes sense to do it. And by cross posting I mean, you post about them, they post about you. And you probably do that the same day or something like that.
Jes Santiago:
You could boost a post too.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, you could do boosting, which is basically paying money to social media to show it to more people. So you can experiment with that and see what it does. If you have a portfolio page that is just a bunch of pictures of stuff you do, I probably wouldn’t spend a ton of money sharing that.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, agreed.
Marc Vila:
Because the goal is not to sell online. Your goal is not necessarily to get customers online, but build trust to potential customers when they look you up or it’s shared. Versus if you’re actually trying to build a following of people where you do something, where you are making your drinkware live and it’s interesting to watch and you have customers on there that are artists that are doing things, and it’s an internet show that you can buy the product, then boosting the post would make sense to get more eyes to that.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. And something I noticed that some small businesses are doing on TikTok is they’re going live on TikTok and they’re tagging one of their customers. They’re tagging their handle in their live, and they say something like, “I’m making your custom tumbler today.” And I don’t know, I’ve seen a ton of people just watch the live, just tune in. It’s them just sitting there making that person’s tumbler or mug for example. That’s kind of interactive. It gets people excited, it gets your customers excited. It even gets people who are just random. I’m pretty random. I probably am not going to buy from her, but I watched it. I thought it was cool.
Marc Vila:
The fact that you watched it also will get other followers, because TikTok maybe will… The algorithm will kind of say, “This was interesting to get 300 people to watch for three minutes. The next time this goes live, we’re going to give it some more juice.” Because the goal of most of these platforms is to keep you on them. So if people watch your stuff for a little bit, then they’ll show it to more people. So, great. So there there’s a handful of ideas and thoughts, and look at what other people do and see if that’s something that you want to try. And then the last thing to do is to track performance. For one, I think the number one rule of this is you have to be super patient in the beginning.
Jes Santiago:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Nobody is going to care. You’re going to have zero likes on something that you thought was the best thing you made.
Jes Santiago:
I’ve felt that way before.
Marc Vila:
And yeah, you’re going to ask a question and nobody’s going to answer, “Which one do you like better?” And you have one person that says, “The green one.” And it almost feels like embarrassing for someone else to see that, right? But there are a couple things to remember are, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, their goal is not to make you as famous as possible. Their goal is to make money through ads and please investors, right? And the way that they do that, the best way, the way that ads… What are the most expensive ads on TV? Do you know?
Jes Santiago:
Oh, I don’t know.
Marc Vila:
Super Bowl.
Jes Santiago:
Super Bowl.
Marc Vila:
Super Bowl. Yes.
Jes Santiago:
Okay. That’s what I was thinking.
Marc Vila:
Super Bowl. Why? Because-
Jes Santiago:
Everyone’s tuned in.
Marc Vila:
Everyone’s tuned in, right? It’s one of the most watched things ever. So it’s the most expensive ads. So if Facebook wants to make the most money from ads, they want to have the most eyes on phones.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Marc Vila:
Which means that ads are worth more money, right? And so that’s their goal, right? So their goal is not to make you famous. Their goal is to make money. So over time, you will start building internet points that add up to say that it’s worth it, right? And if your page never becomes worth it to them for whatever reason, it’s a computer deciding this, then that’s when you make it worth it by you paying for it. By boosting it.
Jes Santiago:
Boosting. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
And then that gives you the shot to potentially grow faster. You put 20 bucks into this, it went from two views to 1,000 views. A good amount of people commented, and then that gives you a little more points. So you’re kind of the internet, the AI is going to say, “All right, I mean this people seem to like this. The next time they boost it, we’re going to show it to more people. And the next time they post, more of these people that followed are going to probably be shown it again.” So it’s kind of a thing over time, but don’t be discouraged by it. The fact that it will be particularly slow. And anybody who… Realistically, if somebody tells you that they started up their social page and they got to 10,000 followers their first month, I mean, they lied.
Jes Santiago:
I’m thinking they bought it, they bought the followers.
Marc Vila:
Or they just got really lucky.
Jes Santiago:
Lucky. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Right? So being lucky is not the rule. Right? Like the lottery example in the beginning. Yes, people win the lottery every week. The chances of it being you are one in 70 million or whatever the number is, right?
Jes Santiago:
It’s so sad.
Marc Vila:
And the same with this getting famous on social media quickly or without purpose is, sure, you may have or heard of somebody who did it. They may be lying. Which I mean, let’s be honest, people lie, that’s not even a secret. People lie. So they may be lying. They may have paid for it, or they may have been lucky.
And then chances are, if you look at somebody who has a really successful social media account, the biggest chance is that they put a lot of work into it over time and were very discouraged for a long period of time, and they did the right things. They kept reaching out to people to collaborate. They kept tagging people, commenting, going through their followers followers and following them.
Jes Santiago:
That person, whoever said that probably didn’t mention all of what Marc is talking about.
Marc Vila:
Right. Right. They may not have mentioned the fact that, oh, I mean I spent 30 hours a week. I’m trying to remember who, I spoke with somebody who was particularly busy on social media and they were saying that it was like they spent 30 to 40 hours a week doing it.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, it takes time.
Marc Vila:
I think it was a customer or something. But they had… Yeah. And they said, they were like, “Yeah, I mean, every video that you see is two hours worth of work, and I do like 10 a week. So that’s like 20 hours of it. Then I probably spend another 20 hours commenting, sharing.” So point being is that if you’re going to sell online, and that’s going to be the business you’re going to do, it’s a full-time job. You know, it’s a good amount of work and it’s going to take some luck. And if you put 40 hours a week into, it’s going to ramp up faster than if you put 20, or 10, or two.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. You’ve got to have that expectation kind set for yourself.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Have the expectation for yourself that… Because the worst thing that’ll happen is you put a good amount of work into it, even if it’s like an two hours a week, eight, 10 hours a month, and then you give up because you thought it was going to happen super quick. So if you go in and saying, “I’m going to be number one, I’m going to win. I’m going to make money on it, I understand that if I only put in two hours a week, it will be slow. And if I put in 40, it’ll be faster as long as I have a plan and keep going.”
Jes Santiago:
Exactly.
Marc Vila:
So set the expectation, have a plan, and then consider everything that we talked about. Who’s your audience? What’s your branding going to look like? How are you going to view the results? And the last bit about tracking performance is just look for wins.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, exactly. Look for wins. I mean, you can get pretty specific with tracking. I don’t know if we want to necessarily…
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would say, I mean, tracking is actually a good episode in and of itself.
Jes Santiago:
That is actually.
Marc Vila:
So we can talk about that. So maybe we’ll stay tuned for that in the future. But I would say generally speaking tracking, look at the stats on the post. They’ll give you stats on the business side of things in any platform.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah. There’s analytics tools that you can use.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. How many people looked at it? You can just go simple at first. How many views did it get? How many likes did it get? How many comments? How many people shared it?
Jes Santiago:
How many people saved it?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. All that stuff. You just look at simple stuff, and look for something interesting. So you posted a picture of a tumbler because you made custom tumblers. And normally you get five likes and this one got 20. So why?
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, exactly. Ask yourself why. What did you do differently? And then if that worked, try to recreate that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It might not be obvious too, which is the interesting thing too, because for us, we’ve seen that and there’s still some posts I don’t understand why.
Jes Santiago:
I don’t get why this one did so well.
Marc Vila:
It could have been anything.
Jes Santiago:
The audio that you use.
Marc Vila:
The audio that you used, it could have been just the color was real eye catching. You used a particular color of green that really popped out in the screen, so more people stopped to look at it because it got their attention for a second. It could have just been the time of the year, you know, you posted something really interesting around Christmastime and then that was your best post. So how do you recreate that? Well, you’re going to say, “I’m going to try and do Valentine’s Day too.” Okay, well maybe don’t expect the same results because it’s not as popular of a holiday per se. Right?
Jes Santiago:
Exactly.
Marc Vila:
So look for interesting wins, look forward to ways to recreate it, and just have some patience, and keep looking and working on it. So I think that covers about everything. Is there anything else you wanted to add at the end?
Jes Santiago:
I mean, I don’t think so. I think just piggybacking off of you, be patient, have a plan, just set an expectation for yourself that the amount of time you’re going to put in might be a lot if you want to get bigger, if you want to… Might happen over a year, might happen over two years, or a few months, honestly. Just set realistic expectations, realistic goals, and just do the research and do the work.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Do the research, and do the work is a great thing to do. And also go all the way back to the plan. Because if the plan is for it to be an online portfolio that having 100 likes is probably never necessarily the goal. Listen, I sell to local businesses, I just want a place to put all my stuff publicly that’s different than my website. And that’s what it’s going to be. So maybe you’re not going to super get into social and it’s literally, you know what? I’m going to spend less than an hour of a week on it. I’m just going to be posting, building that up. On the flip side compared to you’re looking to sell online. So go back to the goal and determine what it is, and then just follow that correctly and you’ll be good. And be patient with it and take time to learn it.
Jes Santiago:
Don’t be afraid to test.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, don’t be afraid to test out. Try something new if you’re really curious about doing it, and talk to your customers about it. That’s the best way to do it is people that you meet face to face, you can get them to follow, like, hare, talk about it, participate with you on social, leave me a review on Facebook, stuff like that.
Jes Santiago:
Exactly.
Marc Vila:
And then also I say, just if you want to get more reviews on Facebook or more comments or likes, I mean, just literally tell them why. If somebody’s super happy and they’re like, “I love this hat you made, it’s the best. The kids on the team are so happy because their last hats they messed up the numbers for six of the kids and they were so disappointed that the first game they had the wrong number at it, a number, and kids have tape on the back of their hats with Sharpie. I mean…
Jes Santiago:
You can get so specific, Marc, it cracks me up.
Marc Vila:
So that’s something that could happen. And now they’re really happy and you can literally just say, “I appreciate it so much. I look forward to doing business again. You know what, one of the things I’m really trying to do is build up the amount of reviews I have on Facebook. So if you’re on there and you want to leave five stars, it would really mean a lot to me too. It’d be a great way to say thanks as well.”
Jes Santiago:
Just be honest.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, just be honest. And oftentimes that person who was really satisfied would be like, “Sure. Yeah. I mean, I use Facebook all the time. I’ll do it right now.” And they’ll find you and literally do it right at that moment. And so just ask for it. So all right. Oh, what did I write in the end here just to make sure in my notes here.
Jes Santiago:
Basically everything we said.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Jes Santiago:
I think.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it sounds good then. I think we nailed everything. So go ahead and you can take a look. Go to ColDesi on social media and on Instagram, or TikTok, or Facebook, you can go to ColDesi, Colman and Company is another.
Jes Santiago:
Digital Heat Effects.
Marc Vila:
Digital Heat Effects. Those are the big accounts that we spend time on. You can take a look at some of the stuff we’ve done. Yeah. And I’ll say, I mean, some of our stuff doesn’t have tons of likes or interaction. It’s a little bit portfolio style. Some of the stuff we do have a lot of interaction on and so not every post needs to be a win. And we’re in a niche industry. We’re in the customization business. We’re not selling something that that every single person is buying. So I don’t expect us to have as many likes as something entertainment like someone who’s an amazing dancer or singer.
Jes Santiago:
Yeah, ASMR. People love that.
Marc Vila:
That’ll be a whole podcast too, then. Well, great. Thanks for listening and definitely go to ColDesi.com if you’re interested in learning about the different types of customization equipment that we have to offer. And feel free to send a message on any of our accounts on social media. Ask us any questions that you have. And if you really want to directly speak about equipment that we have to sell, then that’s not going to be Jes or I that do that, that’s other folks in the business. So if you go to ColDesi.com, you can live chat with folks if you want to talk about customization equipment. But thanks for listening. My name’s Marc Vila.
Jes Santiago:
And I’m Jes Santiago.
Marc Vila:
And we’ll see you in the next episode of Custom Apparel Startups.
Jes Santiago:
Thank you.