Social Media and Advertising

[sy_woodworking]

There's a big upheavel going on on social media at the moment, lots of people switching from one platform to another so if you use social media as part of your advertising and marketing then it's going to be an interesting time. Traditionally you have Facebook, Instagram & X but others have joined in recently, each with different demographics ... which do you use?

I'm creating a "Starter Pack" on BlueSky of picture framers, manufacturers and suppliers but they are very few and far between, does anyone here have a BlueSky account for their business?

What about the others, Mastodon & Threads? Does anyone use TikTok for marketing?

[Justintime]

Instagram only here. It's where my market is.

[Tudor Rose]

Facebook and Instagram for us. And that takes up enough of our time so we aren't keen to add any more platforms to it.

We gave up on Twitter when it was still Twitter. Far too toxic.

[pramsay13]

I mainly use Facebook and Instagram. I generally post the same thing on both although sometimes I switch it up a bit.
Most of my business comes through word of mouth or website or google searches, but from social media Facebook is miles ahead of anything else.
I post in local facebook groups and if anyone asks for a recommendation my name comes up and I often get a few jobs from that.
I've had a few jobs from instagram but not many.
I also have a tik tok account but I haven't had any business from it and I mainly use it for random videos.
I still have a twitter account but I haven't posted for years and I don't think I ever got any customers from it.

[sy_woodworking]

Do you measure how many sales you get via each channel actively, or just ask clients where they found you?

[pramsay13]

Not in any scientific way but people normally tell me if they've been before or if they've been recommended and where the recommendation came from.

[Justintime]

Personally I think life is too short to study the analytics too closely that come in from Google and my website. Google tells me views and calls but it's impossible to tally calls with customers. The website looks at views but recently it's sharing human views vs bot views, so I think I'm going to stop paying any attention to them at all from now on

[sy_woodworking]

That's my take too, if you sell online then you can add tracking that lets you see which sales came from which adverts or social media posts, but once the interaction crosses over into the real world you lose any of that, same for magazine, TV & radio ads etc, it's always a gut feel isn't it.

[bang]

I use Instagram and facebook.

My facebook page barely gets any traction, I think it's throttled a bit.

Instagram is better, but is mainly artists who I've framed for that interact with the posts. So as far as new customers go I don't think it's a great platform.

Facebook is better for me in a word of mouth kind of way. I've noticed people recommending me on local groups when looking to have some framing done. So that's not been bad...but as I said, not great for traffic on the page itself.