POD Insights

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Promoting your print on demand business, whether it’s on Etsy or your own site, plays an important role in generating traffic to your shop as well as building followers. In this episode we’re going to talk about the many options and channels you have for both free and paid methods of promoting your business so stick around and let’s talk about how you can take advantage of the tools and resources out there.

I focus primarily on selling through Etsy, so that’s where I’m going to spend the majority of this conversation. However, if you sell print on demand products online through your own website or Shopify store, then you’re likely no stranger to promoting your business because it’s up to you to generate all the traffic for your business. Etsy sellers like me, as well as anyone who sells on Amazon through seller central, we don’t have to generate traffic from scratch. The Etsy marketplace is well established and attracts millions of shoppers every day. To start getting views and sales, we just need to offer a quality design at a competitive price, and do some keyword research to make sure our listings can be found by our target audience through search results. However, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend time also generating our own direct traffic to our shop and individual listings. Especially when you can do it for free.

Social Media Platforms

There really is a lot you can do to promote your shop or your brand completely for free. Social media has made promotion attainable for all independent business owners without having to pay for advertising. Of course, you can also pay for advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, but let’s start with everything you can do for free.

A brand that creates designs for products like apparel, gift items, and accessories is a great fit for social media because by default you’re going to have a lot of images to share of your designs and products. So this is a natural fit for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Twitter is also a great platform for communicating with your followers, and while you can include images in your tweets, that isn’t the primary focus of Twitter. However, if you build a twitter following it’s a great way to share promotions or sales, coupon codes, giveaways or contests, or just interact with your followers.

Do you have to dive into all these platforms at once? Not at all. If you have an aptitude for social media and you already manage personal accounts on all these platforms easily, then you certainly can create accounts on all of them for your print on demand business. But if you’re less experienced with social media then it might be a good idea to start with a couple, start to build a following and then expand from there so it’s not too overwhelming. There are also a lot of tools that help make professional looking posts or even publish directly to your account – Canva is a great example and we’ll get to that a bit later. Let’s just briefly talk about each platform first.

Instagram is great for brands because of the focus on visuals, whether it be classic image or carousel posts or video stories. It’s very easy to create a business account on Instagram with just a few details required. I know there’s been some headlines lately about Instagram turning more towards video content, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet. Even if it does happen, you can use tools like Canva and Placeit to make video content that shows off your designs, so I think Instagram is a great place for your business. For simple photo posts, you don’t even need fancy templates – just take one or two of your product mockup images (the good ones from Placeit or another mockup generator – not the default ones on a white background) and post them with a caption and some hashtags and they’ll look great. Speaking of hashtags – this is where Instagram really helps your business. One issue we all face when starting a social media account for a business is gaining followers. This is important because the more followers you have, the more impressions each post will make, and the more opportunity for your followers to share your posts with their own followers and friends. But gaining followers from scratch as a totally unknown brand can be tough. But Instagram has a really solid system of hashtags that seems to be better for businesses like ours compared to some other social media platforms. One of the things that determines the images you see in your home feed is the hashtags that you follow. For example, if you follow the hashtag #etsyfinds, you’ll see new posts that mention that hashtag in your home feed. That particular hashtag is for sharing images of products on Etsy that someone thinks are cute or cool or fun. So if you tag your post with #etsyfinds, then it has a great chance of being seen by people that are interested in Etsy products. Imagine that – you were able to target a fairly specific audience for your product without any paid ads! The more hashtags you add to each post, the more potential impressions it can make in addition to all your followers seeing it. This is how you gain followers organically, by adding several relevant hashtags in your posts so people who might be interested in your products can see them. I personally started an instagram account for my print on demand Etsy shop and within about three months I had almost 500 followers. Now, there are plenty of people out there who gain followers at a faster rate than that, and also plenty of people who have more expertise in social media marketing than me, but 500 followers just from using hashtags I think is pretty good. Instagram even gives you hashtag suggestions and shows how many followers they each have when you are entering them, which is very helpful. Here’s my system for tagging each post: I include 2-3 hashtags from each of the following categories: design-specific, product-specific, and general. So I usually have 6-10 hashtags per post. I do alter that general approach slightly depending on the content of the post – for example some posts might be multiple designs all on hoodies, and another post might be just one design shown on several products. Here’s one specific example: If I am sharing a post of a new design on a hoodie and a t-shirt, let’s say it’s a mount rainier national park themed design, my hashtags might look like this: #nationalparks, #mountrainier, #mtrainier, #nationalparkshirts, #pnw, #hoodielove, #cutegifts, #giftideas, #giftsforall, #etsyfinds. With these hashtags, I’m giving my post a great chance at being seen by new people who might view my profile and follow my account, or even click on the link in my profile to view my Etsy shop. A great way to get started finding hashtags to use on your posts is to follow some of your peers. In the marketplace they’re your competitors, but on social media they’re your peers and there’s nothing wrong with being friendly with other creators because there are plenty of sales opportunities for all of us. If you follow accounts of other designers and artists that sell on Etsy, Redbubble, or other marketplaces, you can show some friendly support by liking their posts, but you can also look at their posts to see what hashtags they are using to get ideas for ones that might work well with your posts. Back to that link in your profile – one downside to Instagram is that you cannot include links in individual posts. We have to direct everyone to view our profile because you can include a link in your profile. So Instagram is a great starting place and very easy to use even if you don’t use tools like Canva to create your posts.

Although there might be a few reasons why Facebook owning Instagram is not a good thing, one nice thing about it is that when posting to Instagram you can choose to automatically share the same post in your Facebook account. For this reason, it’s a good idea to also have a Facebook account for your business if you are starting an Instagram account. Facebook makes it a little more confusing to create a business account because businesses have a page…which is not the same thing as an account. There also has to be a page owner or admin, which generally is your personal account. This means you have to have a personal FB account and then create your business page. You don’t have to show your personal account information on the business page though, so if you don’t use your name or image in your business it doesn’t have to be displayed in the business page. But once you get the account setup sorted out, posting is easy. Facebook posts can be different than your Instagram posts, but why take advantage of the auto-post to both places if you’re sharing new designs or products? You can also share posts about promotions, sales, or giveaways in both places at the same time this way. Facebook does unfortunately have a different set of standard dimensions for images in posts than Instagram, but If you post to Instagram and then copy to Facebook it doesn’t look really bad or anything, the images just aren’t exactly the perfect Facebook size. One nice thing about Facebook is that individual posts can include links, so if you want to link to an individual product or section of your store, you can add that link into your FB post instead of always having to say “link in description” and have just one link. Facebook does have hashtags, but in general the system is not implemented the same way, so you won’t gain as many page followers by using hashtags on Facebook. There are a few ways to gain followers on Facebook including:

Referring your audience to your Facebook page from all possible places such as other social media accounts, your email marketing, your shop homepage, your order receipt messages, etc.
Friends and family sharing your page and posts from your page (as well as following themselves).
Interacting on other pages and Facebook groups to increase your visibility.
Offer incentives to follow, mention, or tag on Facebook such as coupon codes, through the same channels mentioned in #1.

Many of those also apply to other platforms, I’m just mentioning them in reference to Facebook since growing followers organically on Facebook is a little more difficult than on Instagram.

Pinterest is another platform that can be a good fit for sellers like us, since our product is visual in nature and we tend to offer a variety of products that people might look for on Pinterest. I honestly couldn’t tell you what Pinterest was created for, I’m certainly not an expert on Pinterest posting or strategies. But what I can tell you is that people use Pinterest to look for inspiration about lots of different things – from wedding invitations to clothing and gift items. You create individual posts or Pins, and pin them to a board. A board is like a collection or category. So a person might create a board called “Christmas gift ideas” and then search for things their friends and family might like, and then add pins to the board of the things that they want to remember or look at again later. These pins might be simple images that another user shared, or they might be pins created by a brand or seller like us to show off a specific product with a direct link to our store to purchase the item. For your account, you can create boards by design or by product category or any other system that works for you. I have boards for things like holiday gift ideas, designs for nature-lovers, etc. and then I create pins for each one. Pinterest also has hashtags which helps your pins show in search results when someone is looking for something. The nice thing about Pinterest is that people actively search for things, so it’s almost the same behavior as when they are shopping and we’re already familiar with that. So if we put relevant search terms and phrases into the title of our pins and in the hashtags within each pin, we will show up in search results. You pins gets views from the search results, but also when it is pinned to other boards. When a user pins your pin to their board, then anyone who follows that user and views their board will also see your pin. You can also have followers who will see each new pin you create in their home feed. So there are multiple ways for your pins to be viewed and clicked on. Even if your account doesn’t gain a high number of followers, your individual pins can still make a lot of impressions. One downside to Pinterest is that they have a very specific requirement for their post dimensions. They are vertically oriented and a specific size/shape. Because of this I usually use Canva to make my Pinterest pins since they have templates that make it easy to know your pin will look good. Canva also has a feature where you can publish to Pinterest right from your Canva account so that makes it easier as well. Pinterest is a great add-on type of account for your print on demand business because you can create pins whenever you have the time and you don’t necessarily lose momentum if you don’t do it regularly. You can still create pins that will be found through search at any time and even though you have followers, Pinterest doesn’t seem to have the same repercussions from have a gap in time between your posts.

Let me just explain that point a little bit further – if you post regularly for a while and then stop on social media, there are a couple repercussions depending on the platform. Disclaimer – I don’t claim to know all the inner-workings about this, this is just coming from my experience and general understanding. Even though you may not be paying for ads or promoted posts, social media platforms have algorithms that determine how your posts will show up in a user’s feed. If your account is active and has recent posts and those posts are generating interactions – meaning likes, comments, sharing, etc. – then your posts are going to be given a little boost and show up in your followers’ feeds and in the hashtag feeds more prominently. So if you take an extended break from posting or interacting on the platform, the algorithm that monitors all those things will start to notice the lack of activity and start promoting other posts instead of yours. Again, I don’t claim to know exactly how this works on each platform, but my understanding is that these factors do impact the visibility of your posts. Now of course this doesn’t mean you can never take a break from posting, but if you do take an extended break, expect that there might be a time period where you have to build back up to the same pace of gaining new followers once you start again.

Ok, let’s talk about Twitter and then we’ll discuss a few tips for your social media marketing and post creation. Admittedly I have not created a Twitter account for my print on demand business. I actually just recently created one for POD Insights so feel free to follow me, my handle is @POD_insights. So as you can tell, I don’t have much experience with Twitter. But I do know it’s a platform that a lot of you are likely already familiar with, and it can be another great option for your business. However, as I mentioned earlier, Twitter is not really focused on being a visual media platform. You can certainly attach images to your Tweets, but it wasn’t built as an image-sharing platform like Instagram was. So I personally think it’s a great way to have an extra channel where you do things like share sales or promotions that you’re running, updates about your shop, interact with your followers, and share your new designs, but I wouldn’t necessarily just copy what I’m doing on Instagram over to Twitter if that makes sense. Twitter is a great place to ask questions of your followers, like “what’s are your top holiday gift picks this year?” And then share something that you like or something from your shop of course. And then interact with the replies. This interaction and sharing is a way to hopefully get retweets, which will be seen by that person’s followers, which is one way for you to gain new followers. You can also use tactics like offering coupon codes for any customer who posts a photo review on Twitter and @mentions your account.

If you’re wondering whether we’re going to talk about TikTok, nope we’re not. Ok well just for a minute – I’m not going to do a deep dive on TikTok in this episode because it’s a totally different platform compared to the ones I’ve mentioned so far. Other social media platforms are based in the structure of periodic posts that are either written or visual, or a combination. Video might occasionally be a part of them, such as short video clips or GIFs, but they are not focused on video. This is a good thing for most business owners trying to establish a social media presence, because thinking of a few short sentences and hashtags, and uploading a couple photos is not in itself a challenging task. Sure, there’s a lot of strategy involved and things to learn to be effective and successful, but the basic act of creating a post can be done in a few minutes and doesn’t require you to step in front of the camera. Not everyone is comfortable being on camera and even if you are, creating your own short videos to promote your business is not quite as simple as posting a couple photos to Instagram. While I’m not personally experienced with TikTok, I’ve been making YouTube videos for over a year and the POD Insights channel now has over 3k subscribers. That’s still a very small channel in the big scheme of things and I can tell you creating quality video content that people actually want to watch takes a good amount of research, work, and lots and lots of editing out saying things that make no sense. Ok well that last one might just be me but the point is, jumping right into video-focused social media is not my top recommendation for most people. However, if you are already comfortable with this format and have experience on TikTok, then you certainly can explore making content for your business. It might be a little challenging to make TikTok videos featuring your real-life products since you’d have to have samples and that can get expensive, but you certainly could use the platform to share video posts that are available through Canva or Placeit.

So if you’re new to social media in general or just don’t want to jump in and create all these accounts at the same time, what should you start with? In my opinion I think I would start with Instagram and Facebook, because they are a good fit for sharing visuals of your designs and products, and you have the benefit of being able to post to both accounts at the same time. Pinterest is a great addition whenever you have time to make pins because users are basically shopping, so it’s also a great fit for sharing your products. However the format of pins is very different than Instagram and Facebook so you’ll need to create them separately. Twitter might be the last one I’d go for – I don’t mean that as in I wouldn’t recommend Twitter, I just mean I think in terms of promoting your print on demand business it’s probably the platform that has the fewest benefits for our purposes. People don’t tend to shop on Twitter or look for gift ideas on Twitter as much as they do on other platforms, so while it can be great for interacting with followers, that’s why I wouldn’t personally prioritize it above the others. But if you’re a social media pro and you disagree with my assessment, feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments on the blogpost for this episode on podinsights.net.

Social Media Tactics

I’ve mentioned some tactics you can use on each platform but let me just mention a few general social media tactics that you can use to promote your brand or shop. These are certainly not all-inclusive and you can find some great information online about specific ideas to promote your brand – my only advice when it comes to taking advice about promoting your business I guess would be the same advice for a lot of things. There’s a lot of great information out there, but be cautious about strategies that involve up-front cost. For example, if you find a great blog article about promoting your business on social media and the ideas sound great but it involves paying hundreds of dollars a month for paid ads, that’s not a great starter plan if you’re not very experienced in social media marketing because it can get out of hand quickly. So really that’s no different than the mindset you should have when researching anything I guess but there’s just so much out there about social media marketing that I thought it was worth mentioning.

Here are some general categories of tactics for social media that you can employ:

Promoting new designs and products. This one is pretty obvious – post photos of your newest designs and products in your social media accounts. This is sort of a baseline that you should be doing to raise awareness of new products, and it’s a great fit for instagram especially because of the focus on visual media and the great hashtag system so you can target each post based on the design or product. It’s also worth sharing these on Facebook and Pinterest. Twitter is an option too, but you don’t necessarily need to post a photo of every single design on Twitter. However if you create a design in response to a trend, especially a trending phrase or joke or something like that which is probably circulating on Twitter, then absolutely post that to Twitter with a link to the product page for people to jump right to your store and buy it.
Promoting seasonal items or product types. This is basically the same approach as posting pictures of new designs and products, but you’re mixing it up with seasonal items instead. For example, as the weather gets colder, make post with some of your sweatshirt designs and a caption about staying warm. Holiday-themed posts would fall into this category as well, like a post showing off your Halloween designs. Again, this is a great fit for Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.
Sharing sales or coupon codes. Everybody likes to feel “exclusive” even if they’re part of a large group. When you share a sale or coupon code that is “just for our followers” people tend to like that. Of course you can also share store-wide sales that apply to everyone through your social media accounts. This is one you definitely can share on Twitter as well as all other accounts you have because you hopefully will get some folks to re-tweet to share with their followers. You also can layer this tactic with others, like if you are running a sale on Halloween designs you would make post that combines the seasonal theme with a sale or coupon code. Don’t forget to share the dates of sales – it creates a sense of urgency.
Questions or polls. Now we’re getting into the interaction part of social media. You can still include a visual aspect, and you have to if it’s on instagram, but this one is well-suited to Twitter because Twitter is all about conversation. It also works on Facebook, but it’s not a tactic you would really use on Pinterest. Basically you’re asking pretty much any question to your followers and just getting them to interact with you by answering. The sky’s the limit on this one in terms of the types of questions you can ask. It could be totally unrelated to your business like “name something that made you smile today”, or you can relate it to your business with a question like “what’s on your summer clothing must-have list this year?”. Your goal is not to sell a specific product with these types of posts, it’s just to interact with followers and show that you’re not just here to sell stuff to them with every post. These are great posts to schedule using a social media tool because you can think of a week’s worth and then they post at your scheduled time.
Giveaways. This is one you can use to help gain followers and it does have a cost associated. You come up with a contest and have an item or items that you’re giving away. Usually it would be something from your store, so it could be a water bottle with your design on it, or a pack of stickers, or a t-shirt, etc. You can either have the item already or drop-ship it to the winner through a manual order on your platform. You could even personalize the design for the winner if you want to so it’s unique to them. There are several ways to do this, but a basic giveaway contest would be something like – share my instagram account with five friends and then send me a DM. One winner (or more) will be picked at random on X date. Then on that date you check your messages for everyone who messaged saying they shared your page with five friends, and pick the winner at random. You message the winner to let them know they won and you’ll need their delivery address to send the gift. You can also suggest they message you the address in your Etsy shop account or through your website if they don’t want to message it through Instagram (or whichever platform you’re running the contest on). And of course, ask them to post a photo of the gift when it arrives and tag your account. As I mentioned there are several variations of how you can run a giveaway but that’s the general idea, and it can help your account gain views from other individuals who wouldn’t otherwise see and follow you.

Pro Tip from Etsy Seller and recent YouTube channel guest Michelle B: If you order samples of some of your items (assuming they come out the way you wanted), you can use them for multiple purposes like taking custom mockup photos and then use them as giveaway items.

There are other ways to leverage your social media accounts and other types of posts, but five is probably good to start with.

Social Media Tools

I mentioned scheduling social media posts using a tool, so let’s talk about the types of tools you can use to help create posts and manage your accounts. You can, of course, just create posts and manage your accounts directly on each platform. But even if you post directly like that, you still may want some help in designing your posts.

Canva is an excellent tool for many things we need as e-commerce business owners, including social media. Even the free Canva account has access to a huge variety of social media post templates, graphic elements, fonts, and the ability to connect your social accounts to post directly from Canva if you want to. I really like to use Canva templates because they are pre-made to the appropriate size for each social media platform, so when you browse “Instagram Templates” you know you won’t have to do any resizing. Uploading your product or design images and adding them into post templates is also super fast and easy. I like to use the templates especially for informational posts like when I’m sharing a sale or coupon code because it gives them a really nice professional look. Canva also has a great iPad, iOS, and Android app so you can create and access your posts from multiple devices or when traveling. I have used the iPad app while traveling and it’s got pretty much all features of the web browser. You can download the image files for your post and then go directly to your social media platform or post to your account right from Canva like I mentioned. If you have a Canva Pro account, then you also have access to the social media calendar tool which lets you schedule posts. If you’re serious about your business’ social media strategy then scheduling posts is a really nice thing to have because once you’re creating posts for multiple platforms multiple times per week, it can be a lot to keep up with. But being able to schedule posts means you can plan out a week’s worth of posts in one sitting, schedule them and then only have to check in on your posts for interactions and replies throughout the week. Of course, you can always add impromptu posts whenever you want, but scheduling really helps you organize your time and it also helps when you’re taking a vacation or won’t be available to post when you regularly would.

Canva currently allows you to share posts directly to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, so you may not require any additional social media tools, at least not when you are just getting started. But there is a whole world of social media tools out there, and many that provide analytics or other helpful features that Canva doesn’t offer. Buffer is one such tool, and while the foundational feature of Buffer is post scheduling across multiple platforms, it offers a lot more features than that. There is a free plan which allows you to schedule posts for up to three channels, so if you have a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter account, you can manage all 3 with Buffer’s free account and you can have a queue of up to 10 scheduled posts per channel at any given time (there’s no maximum number of posts total, just how many can be scheduled or pending at one time). They do have paid subscription plans as well, with the first Tier being $5 per channel per month, so those three accounts would cost $15 per month to manage using the Essentials plan. There are a lot of features this plan offers that are not included in the free account, but some highlights are a maximum of 2,000 scheduled posts per channel at any given time, included custom bit.ly shortened links, custom video thumbnails, multi-channel campaign management, Instagram Stories scheduling, and a whole suite of analytics features that are not included in the free account. These include what they call an overall performance analysis and breakdown of metrics across all channels, individual post metrics and historical data, campaign analysis, hashtag performance, audience demographics reports, and machine learning suggestions for post content, timing, and frequency. There are more features included but those are some of the most significant. Buffer also integrates with TikTok if you are interested in having a business account.

These tools can also help you manage replying to comments on your social media accounts, and Buffer is certainly not the only social media tool out there, I know Agorapulse is another popular one and I’m honestly not sure about how the specific features compare to Buffer. If you’re looking for a social media management tool for scheduling and organizing posts, it probably would be a good idea to do some googling and check for articles that compare the different tools. My only tip there would be to try to find articles written by someone who has actually tried the tools they are reviewing. Social media tools can be helpful if you’re managing multiple social media accounts but I strongly suggest researching them before signing up for one because I’m not an expert on the best ones.

My Workflow

So if I’m not super familiar with the multitude of social media management tools out there, what I do for my Etsy shop? I do use some of the tactics that I’ve talked about, I just haven’t gotten to the point of using the management tools because I don’t post daily to multiple platforms.

I use Canva to send my posts directly to Instagram, where they are automatically also posted to my Facebook page. For Pinterest, I also use Canva templates but instead of pushing the pins directly to Pinterest, I download the images and upload them manually. Why the extra step? Well, this could just be me being picky but I find that Pinterest just has a more finicky upload/posting process where you might have to make adjustments to the placement of your account logo and since I would have to log into Pinterest to add hashtags and a link to my pins anyway, I just upload them manually and do it all together. For some reason I just prefer to do it that way vs. pushing from Canva for Pinterest. Also, I want to stress the importance of hashtags and links. If you use a tool that can submit your posts for you, pay attention to whether the tool allows you to include your description or caption and hashtags for the post. If it only lets you submit the images for the post, you’ll still need to log into your accounts to add those. While the images will catch a user’s attention and show off your designs, it’s the hashtags that put the post in front of more people outside your direct followers and the links (for Facebook or Pinterest especially) direct the users to your shop. Just posting photos with no caption, hashtags or links will really only be something nice to look at for your existing followers. Hopefully they share it with their followers, but hope isn’t a tactic so you need hashtags and links. I primarily use my Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest social media accounts to share new designs, and I also do seasonal posts and share the sales or coupons for my Etsy store.

Note: You can also use your Etsy seller dashboard Marketing ➤ Social Media page to create a new post to linked social media accounts and they do allow you to include a caption and hashtags. However, if you don’t upload a new image it will use an image from your listing, which means it may not be the optimized dimensions for the social media platform (ex: Pinterest).

Social Media Analytics

One thing that all social media platforms provide business accounts with, even if without any paid advertising, is analytics on how your posts perform. In general, every platform provides you with data on how many impressions each post makes, what the source of impressions was (news feed, your account page, hashtags, etc.), how many comments, likes and shares each post has, and even how many profile visits or link clicks each post has. Some platforms also provide trending of this data over time at the account level in addition to individual post statistics. In fact, the amount of data the platforms provide is one of the reasons I haven’t sprung for a paid subscription to one of the manager tools like Buffer. Those tools do provide a comprehensive view of analytics across all your accounts which can be time-saving, but most (if not all) the metrics they provide are available for free in your account on each platform. I’m sure there is probably a few metrics that are proprietary, meaning they measure something the platforms don’t, or at the very least they aggregate the data from all your accounts together for an easier way to track your overall engagement, but you have to weight the value of that against the monthly cost of the tool. I recommend getting very comfortable with all the analytics that your accounts provide free of charge so you can determine if the “extra” analytics provided by a management tool are worth the cost – or at least help to make the cost justifiable when considered with the other features of the tool.

Why do you care about analytics? I would normally say there are no dumb questions but since I asked that one myself and you are a business owner, I’ll say that was a dumb question. Hopefully you’re already familiar with the analytics available through your selling platform – if you’re an Etsy seller, there is a whole section of your seller dashboard dedicated to statistics of your, right down to what keywords are leading customers to your individual listings so you can adjust your tags and sell deeper into a niche. Because you understand the value of that information, you likely already know why you care about analytics for your social media posts. The insight these metrics provide can help you decide what to feature in future posts, which hashtags to continue using or stop using, types of posts that don’t perform well, who your primary audience is within your follower base, and more. All of this helps you adjust your strategy for each platform and create content that connects with your audience and generates interaction. For example, if you review the volume of comments, likes, and shares for your instagram posts and you notice that two of them have a much higher volume of overall interaction than the rest, and both of those posts included a question in the caption rather than just a statement, now you know that asking a question will generate more engagement and help your post be seen by more people. You may have known that particular tip already…especially since I mentioned asking questions as a tactic just a few minutes ago, but it’s just an example of why analytics are important to developing your social media strategy.

Social Media Ads

If you were wondering whether we’re going to talk about social media ads, we’re going to save a deeper dive on that for another episode but I’ll briefly mention them. I wanted this episode to focus on getting started with promoting your print on demand business on social media and I don’t recommend jumping into paid ads until you get a feel for what style of posts work best for you. You’re likely going to try out several styles of posts like plain images of your products, templates from tools like Canva, video posts, etc. and after a while you will start to notice which style fits your brand best and gets the most interaction from followers. You’ll also get better with your hashtags and general strategies. Once you have some of that experience and you have some steady revenue coming into your business, then I recommend looking into some paid ads. Here are a few reasons why that is my recommendation:

This is probably obvious but it’s my main reason – you’ll create more effective ads for the platform when you’re more experienced on the platform. Your first ad is probably still not going to be the best ad ever made, but at least you will avoid making beginner mistakes like leaving your audience targeting super general and wasting ad spend on people who are not at all interested in your products, or promoting a post that doesn’t generate interactions because no research went into the ad creative. You won’t automatically know how to target the right audience just by making posts, but any experience is helpful and at least you will have spent some time seeing what types of your posts generated more or less interactions or interest to give you ideas for the ad creative.
Ad spend can get away from you quickly if you’re not careful, and even if you still make that mistake, you’ll hopefully have more revenue coming in to cover that mistake if you have spent some time building your business and your social media accounts. I know being new to social media doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a brand new business, but they do coincide for lots of sellers because getting on social media is something that sellers commonly do when their business is still new. When your business is new, you likely don’t have a high monthly revenue stream so if you run up a $200 tab on Facebook ads without realizing it, that’s coming out of your personal pocket rather than just putting a dent in your profits that month.

Alright, that’s enough about ads for this episode, we’ll come back to paid ad strategies and tips another time but I at least wanted to talk about why I don’t recommend jumping into paid ads if you are new to social media marketing and your business is also new.

Conclusion

I hope this episode has helped you get some ideas for promoting your print on demand business on social media. Even if you already have your accounts created, maybe you picked up an idea or two for new posts or tools to look into. I’ll be working on a video on the YouTube channel soon about getting started on social media as well so head over to the POD Insights channel on YouTube and subscribe to be notified when that comes out, and don’t forget to check out podinsights.net for a full article from this episode including links to all the resources I mentioned.

Thank you to all listeners and viewers, I appreciate your support and engagement. Coming up in the next episode I’ll be doing the September 2022 print on demand update including news from Etsy, print on demand platforms, and more timely niche ideas so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.

Thanks for reading.