No, this isn’t some cyber-Scientology going on, this is me giving myself (and you) a report of things that probably matter very little to you; my social media purge.
I’ll write more about what started this later, but for now, let me just say that this week I have deleted:
3 Instagram accounts (all my business-related ones, I still have my personal one)
3 Twitter accounts (all my Twitter accounts, I don’t use that platform at all now)
1 Planoly account. I used this to manage/automate one of my social media accounts
1 Later account. I used this to manage/automate one of my social media accounts
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1 Zapier account.
2 Buffer accounts. I used these to manage/automate some Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter accounts both personal and when I was managing client social media accounts, something I no longer do.
3 Facebook pages. Business pages working in conjunction with the Instagram, Planoly, and Later to “boost the signal” of my social media campaigns. They are currently just unpublished, sometimes FB doesn’t let you delete things right away. I think this is especially true when you’ve written about possibly leaving Facebook…as if they don’t read/process everything you write there.
2 IFTTT accounts. I used these to automate content posting for several social media platforms, most of which are elsewhere on this list so I don’t need these either.
So now that they’re gone, how will my art business survive?
I didn’t delete these on a whim. I’ve been watching my website and shop traffic stats and analytics for months, looking for trends, fluctuations, and patterns. Here’s what I discovered. No one on Instagram or Twitter visits my website or Etsy shops. It’s true, I haven’t been posting lately on them. I was examining traffic from back when they were getting engagement. When I used my content calendar, was making a concerted effort to grow those followings, and working to convert those people into customers.
In other words, my tribe, and in the context of business, my buying audience, wasn’t there or I was wasting a lot of time and effort trying to find them and not succeeding. I admit those are two very different possibilities, but not mutually exclusive. I also don’t have the capital to hire someone to figure out which it is; if it’s the former, I waste more money discovering the answer. Logically I understand if it’s the latter, I can continue to grow the business through this new channel by continuing to pay someone to do that social media work, but it feels like an expansion that doesn’t really fit. The thing has to grow to continue feeding the thing; like the Roman Empire.
So where is my buying audience? They’re out there meeting me at the markets, and shopping my Etsy store. How do they find my Etsy store? Etsy helps answer that question…warning: graphic content ahead-as in graphs.
This is for just one of my Etsy shops, and these charts cover Jan – May 2018. Taking into account that part of the “other” traffic coming from my website is actually coming from Instagram via my bio link, it’s clear where I should focus any social media efforts. As far as the in-person shoppers, that’s my main income, so a lot of ‘marketing time’ on the computer should be spent booking the best events I can, which is another post entirely!
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Lesson: Gather your intel first, analyze it, then act toward your goals.
EDIT (6/13/2018): I’ve also deleted some other accounts that aren’t specifically social media-related. They include accounts for about.me, Asana, Trello, Stripe, several 3rd party Etsy shop management tools, and several marketing “guru” site logins. It may go without saying, but I’ll write it anyways: I got too wrapped up in so much of the marketing and operations when the size, scope, and goals of my business didn’t warrant it; this article alludes to the some of the refocus and repair it takes when you make that level of a mistake. It’s brutal, time-consuming, and embarassing, so learn from mine and don’t make it yourself!