The landscape for advertising, marketing and selling products has changed dramatically. Social media has become the first avenue a potential customer / client will use to look for your startup, look at your brand, your services and your product. With “business pages”, “service offers” and “product purchases” pages on Facebook. Instagram, and Twitter don’t have those types of business pages but Twitter has advertising opportunities and Instagram has now worked its way to advertise your products or services. Opportunity to contact you, leave reviews for your services or products, or share it with their friends is easier now through one click apps and speak to text review postings. Customers / clients will definitely use it to judge your work or products. Whether you like it or not, it has become an essential part of a startups business model.

It is now a modern day task to post your personal do’s and don’ts on a daily. As these social outlets grow it’s become more of appearances and not something truly enjoyed. The same with business. It has become necessary to not only use social media, but also to be reachable on it to customers, clients and followers, constantly. A perfect example of this would be through Twitter. For a lot of new or small businesses it has become one way to differentiate from larger companies. At times though, it can feel like a heavy burden. Drawlines Misfits is a good example of this roller coaster. During comic book conventions we would start getting orders to design characters for posters, comic covers, and more. After the event is done there are no messages or orders until the next event. So far the processes for us has been: Create a post, take all messages, give prices and wait to see if we have new clients. If not we thank them for thinking of us and we proceed with the 2nd step which is to take design and printing orders and send invoices, so on. Then we have that awesome motivation of timing. Timing has to be quick or the client will lose interest in the design project and we lose our potential new leads (clients).

Even if you manage to be persistent and become a regular user with a respectable following, your problems don’t end there. Whether your business page has 100 followers or 100,000 the audiences are being restricted. This is both in terms of what content shows up on their feeds and how often it does. On Facebook, if you, like many, refuse to pay for promoted posts, your organic post reach (how many people see your content without boosting) is as low as 1–2%, especially for pages with a high number of likes. Facebook has stated as of this 2019 it will become virtually 0%. Why? The official reason given is that Facebook wants to force pages to produce higher quality content and less daily spamming, which is utter bullshit. The true reason is to push pages towards paying for adverts and ‘boosting’ posts. We ain’t stupid, Mark Zuckerberg! The same can be said for Instagram’s future, as it was of course bought by Facebook. As a startup, boosting every post to try to reach your potential audience can be expensive and does not guarantee results. As an ever changing digital environment it’s important to understand the importance of adaptability. We, Drawlines Branding and Marketing, found our own way to hit a reasonable number to target our posts to the right audience. Though there will always be difficulties and challenges do to again, ever changing digital or social media environments.

On social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, there are 100’s of posts competing to be seen on a news feed, every minute of every day. Selfies. Food. Cats. Sunsets. Selfies. Food. Buildings. Fitness… food!! Though I do have to admit I do the same thing sometimes. But I don’t expect Gordon Ramsay to “like” my homemade healthy food pics! Social media sites like Instagram just have so much content its just overwhelming. Social media sites like Instagram have so much content that as a business you would have to post a hire enough amount of posts with hundreds of hashtags to just have people notice you are on Instagram let alone have them hit like on at least one of your posts. This can take out a lot of time away from other jobs or projects that need your attention to help your business.

“Likes” and “shares” have a lot of emphases, but very little meaning. They are nice for a little ego boost, but what do they actually mean for your startup? Depending on what you are trying to accomplish there isn’t really any use for you. For a company like ours there are some uses for a “like” or “share”, for us getting our name out there is important. A brand is only good when someone else remembers you without thinking to hard. If I asked you what is your favorite soda? Your answer would be any of the soda brands you remember drinking the most when you were younger. This is kind of the same deal. The time you spend making and sharing these posts with your brand attached to it somehow helps people notice you from a distance. Communicating to people who leave comments or messages brings them closer to purchase your services or product. But this is the problem with sinking your money into promoted posts. There is no guaranteed conversion rate. A “like” does not mean you get a commission. A “share” will get you more “likes”, but not necessarily any work. An Instagram post with 5 likes or 500 “likes” would potentially have the same outcome — no instant reward of new work. Finding a way to bridge the gap between hooking a new lead from a regular “like” depends on how you show off your trustingness through social media. But if you can’t achieve that all you end up doing it fretting over numbers, and getting depressed when the number of “likes” is lower than you hoped for your business.

In short, a lot of time and a lot of hashtags are wasted if you don’t succeed in obtaining the number of leads to compensate for the time spent. In a time where we are stuck between the old, methods of advertising and marketing and the new, to reach out to a younger audience advertising on social media is a must. But can you do it in a way that benefits your business without to much of a lose? One possible answer is social media now can play a role as customer service, communication, and/or bonding roles to help your business connect to your clients more. However, you choose to use your social media accounts make sure you’re using them in a way that best benefits your business.