How to market to the indie online crowd

from ignite Minneapolis, a social networking event I attended in April.

I’ve gotten (reasonably) savvy at this social network marketing thing, and while I’m certainly still building on my own blog, I’ve had modest success on Myspace with 5000 friends and over on Facebook with around 280 friends.  Also, my Twitter stream continues to grow, and once in awhile it’s with people interested in what I have to say!

I’ve been at this whole business/self-employed thing over two years now, and here’s what I’ve learned about marketing my goods online through social media thus far:

1. Relationships matter. Follower numbers matter minimally at best.
Your business will go a lot farther with repeat customers, and that happens when people know you. It’s better to have a smallish number of genuinely interested followers than scads of people with mild interest – you want to build a core audience. Do these people buy daily? Not at first- but they may refer others who are genuinely interested in you on a daily basis.

2. When you GIVE attention, you GET attention.
This is one of many reasons to keep the number of social media sites you’re on to an absolute minimum. Readers/followers look for new and diverting information from the same source over and over.  Pay attention to and update your pages. Pay attention to who is following you and make comments that are meaningful to them – not just buy!buy!buy! over and over, and especially common mistake I see sellers make.

This is another reason not to try to get as many followers as possible all at once. You can’t genuinely carry on a conversation with 1000 people – but two or three you can. Stadium crowds are for musicians and politicians. The rest of us generally do better in a small, quiet room.

If you make the subject somebody else’s interest once in awhile, you’re more likely to keep your own followers interested. This also works in dating.

3. A lot of old tricks just aren’t working anymore. This is normal, it’s part of change.
The upshot of the proliferation of indie businesses is that a lot of old innovations in marketing just aren’t so innovative anymore. Guerilla and viral marketing worked great in the late 90s, when most people didn’t know what the terms meant. Nowadays freaky Youtube videos/documentary websites/bookmarks stuck in strange places are easily recognized by the consumer as guerilla marketing – and tend to anger said consumer.

Similarly signing pages with nothing but your Etsy mini also has a backfire tendency to it nowadays. Your comments must be relevant to the page before you, otherwise, you’re putting yourself in a position where you get skipped over. Being visual definitely matters, but there is a point where to many graphics contribute to yet more ad-blindness.

Most people are feeling some sort of information overload these days, and when you start working in more ads in even more spaces, all you do in the long run is increase ad-blindness and leave someone associating irritation with your personal brand. This includes butting in on messages other people are trying to send – you don’t just tick off a fellow business person, you tick off the people interested in the original message. You do have freedom of speech in this country, but you and your business are in no way entitled to any other person’s time and attention. You will do much better if you build a good reputation for classy behavior around yourself, and then simply put out content that people want to pay attention to anyway.

Just be cool, indie folk. It’s all you can be.

Share on Facebook