Real Talk: Social Media as it Relates to Your Design Business
Hello designer friends! Today we are tackling another FAQ – tips on how to grow a social following and any specific steps I have taken to do so.
Before we get into anything related to growing your following I really want to emphasize that having a large social media following is NOT a prerequisite for a profitable design business.
One more time just to really hammer this home.
Having a large social media following is not a prerequisite for a profitable design business.
I had my first six figure year with fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. You can thrive without followers. I want to get that out in the open so that if you click away from this window now, you can at least have that takeaway!
Let’s dive in and I will share my take on social, discovering what you actually want, and what to do when you’ve figured it out.
Step One: Come to terms with why you want to grow your social media following.
The first step to growing your social media following is to determine if you actually want to grow your social media following and if so, why. Generally designers seem to respond to this two ways:
I want to increase my inquiries
I just want more followers
It is OKAY to want followers just because you want followers. There is nothing wrong with that. If you just like the challenge, that’s cool with me. The adrenaline rush of engagement is a real thing – it’s not an accident that you feel good when a post gets a lot of likes. That is how they designed these platforms because they understand how your brain works and how to give you tiny hits of dopamine over and over and over again so you come crawling back 150 times a day. It is perfectly okay to live in Mark Zuckerberg’s world, but you gotta own it. You need to be able to say “It is important to me to see my followers increase,” because if you can’t be honest with yourself it will cloud your judgement later on in this process.
If you want to grow your social media presence because you want to increase your inquiries, that’s great too! But you need to determine if Instagram is actually where you will connect with your clients. If you have niched down to digital wellness coaches, Instagram is probably a great fit for you. If you do a lot of presentation work for high-ticket law firms, I would not put a lot of eggs in the Instagram basket. Instead, I would focus on word of mouth and networking your connections like a pro!
A third option which people generally don’t mention but I would think is plausible would be that you want to connect and share your work with other designers because you appreciate the sense of community and encouragement that can sometimes be found online. Whatever your reason is, you need to get clear on it.
Step Two: Give the people what they want.
If growing your social media following is important to you, it is extremely important to give the people what they want. Yes, your social can still be an authentic representation of you and your personality, but if you are truly out to gain as many followers as possible, you will need to become acutely aware of what you are posting, how people are reacting to it, and what they want to see. I highly advocate for setting some firm boundaries, but beyond that, everything that you share will be influenced by what is performing the best.
This is basically the first sentence of the first chapter of the Cliffs Notes version of Marketing 101. Listen to your customer (follower) and show them more of what they want to see. Get comfortable with meeting their needs and being really flexible in terms of what you post and when you post it.
If you’re in the inquiry category, I would make it my life’s mission to follow businesses in industries that you would like to work with. Engage with them authentically and offer advice or reflections whenever appropriate. Be kind and be real. Post the type of work that you WANT to do, not necessarily the work that you are doing. Share the types of projects that a client who is using Instagram would hire you to do. Think about the purchasing decisions made by your ideal client. What would make them more likely to inquire? What can you share to reinforce your quality of work as well as your personality and general brand ethos? More testimonials? More work? More case studies?
Step Three: pause and really, really Think about your relationship with social. (Aka my story, the opposite of all of the advice that I shared above).
I think that social has the potential to be extremely destructive. I have an addictive personality (hi, enneagram 7 here) and have to be very careful with the way I engage with Instagram or it can have a real, lasting impact on my mood.
I started to worry about how many followers I had in the summer of 2016.
It was the first time that it occurred to me that Instagram could be used for something other than selfies of me and my dog, and as soon as I decided I wanted more followers, there was no looking back.
First I wanted to make it to 1,000. Then 2,000. Then 3,000. You see where this is going, right? I remember thinking that if I could just have 10,000 followers, I would have it all. I spent a year trying to post the perfect balance of me - work - dog - house. I called it quilting, and I cared a lot about my feed and how it looked. Not just how it looked from an aesthetic perspective, but how it looked from an aspirational perspective. I really wanted to have it all together and I wanted other people to see that.
In the summer of 2017 I went to stay with my grandparents for a week to serve as a caregiver for my grandpa with my sister. My grandpa had elected to end his cancer treatment and my grandma was not capable of living alone. I vividly remember standing in their backyard and having a stark realization after posting and deleting after an image that didn’t perform well – this was never going to end. Ever. As soon as I hit 10k, I would want 20, and the cycle would continue for as long as I let it.
I talk about this with designers often as it relates to revenue, because I found that I used to be the same way in terms of my financial goals. How much money would you like to make? Um, as much as is humanly possible? I had this insatiable hunger for more, more more (again, enneagram 7) and it was leaving me perpetually unsatisfied while also taking over my entire life. Meanwhile, the inquiry end of the Instagram argument wasn’t holding up. 95% of my clients were acquired via word of mouth, so I couldn’t use that as a crutch.
My grandpa passed away a month later and I logged out of Instagram for good. I took over two months off, a detox of sorts, and tried to really reevaluate my relationship with external validation.
As soon as I let go of worrying about how many followers I had and stopped looking at social media as a lead generator for my business, things took off. Not overnight – but over a few years. I repeat – a few years! All of the sudden I was able to post whatever design-related content I wanted at any time. If I liked the way it looked, I posted it. I drew some firm lines in the sand – no house, no husband, no child, dog can make a rare appearance – and then went to the races. If I loved it, I posted it. And when I loved what I posted, I didn’t care about how it performed. And when I stopped caring about how it performed, everything performed BETTER.
I have never had a business account. I don’t have swipe up. I don’t take on paid partnerships. I don’t look at analytics. I am truly a good six feet of emotional distancing away from my account. I need that space to be able to protect myself. Every once in a while I get a little sad when something I loved creating tanks on the gram, and then pause to reflect on how much easier it is to move on knowing that it’s just my creative outlet.
To be clear – having grown a social presence has afforded me some really neat opportunities, but it is actually #3 in the rankings of how I acquire clients. 1) WOM/Referral, 2) Pinterest, 3) Instagram.
People will sometimes say to me “You can only say that because you already made it.”
First of all I’d question what “making it” really means – I think that social media, by design, is created to make you feel like you have never truly made it, so that you keep coming back for more. But I do acknowledge that I have a following and my honest to goodness only response to “you can only say this because you made it” is that I made it because I stopped trying to make it.
My gut tells me that a lot will change in the next 5–10 years, and I hope that it changes in a way that makes us celebrate designers who are running successful design businesses with minimal social presence. I have a handful of designer friends running large businesses with little to no social media presence. How cool is that? And those designer friends? They volunteer at portfolio reviews, meet young designers for coffee, mentor college grads. They are crushing it and having a major impact along the way.
At the heart of all of this is a deep understanding of and appreciation for your own relationship with social. I did a poll on my Instagram stories a few weeks ago about social and phone usage. One of the questions was “Do you wish you spent less time on your phone?'“
92% of people said yes, 8% of people said no. I found myself being like “What is wrong with you, 8% of people??? EVERYONE wishes they spent less time on their phone!” But I really tried to catch myself as it reinforced that this is a personal process. Maybe you LOVE your phone and want to be in your DMs all day every day. Maybe that gives you life. Maybe growing your followers is extremely important to you because it’s how you measure your impact in the world. You are the only person who knows how you really feel, and I’d challenge you to really unpack that this week. What are you doing, how is it making you feel, how can you do it differently, or better, and how will your life change if you do?