Social Media Best Practices for Your T-Shirt Business

So you named your business, you registered your business and you already have a few customers lined up, but have you thought about how you will promote your t-shirt business?

Social media is a useful place to start. With currently over 3 billion users worldwide and growing every day, it’s likely your customers visit one or more of the top social media sites on a daily basis. Sites like Facebook and YouTube are some of the most visited sites and closely followed behind by Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

smart phone with social media icons

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform

Not all social media platforms are the same. In fact, they are all quite different and each serves a unique purpose with varied audiences. It’s best to do a little detective work to see where your customers hang out. Most likely, it will be Facebook, since it has more users than the other platforms.

Once you have found your audience and you’ve discovered how they interact there, you’ll also want to deliver the right message at the right time. This may include showing sports jerseys you have done well before the start of the season.

Share when it’s the best time for your business. Posting at a certain time of day on a specific day may not be the ideal time for your customers to hear from you. Experiment with different times and days, even evenings and weekends, to see what works.

Keep Your Profile Updated Across All Platforms

Begin by ensuing that your profile for each site has correct information, including your website, email address and phone number. If you have a physical storefront, is your location correct? This is also important for local search so make sure your address is the same across social media platforms and search engine listings, like Google.

Also, don’t forget that your profile picture and cover photo matter. Choose an image that best represents your business. This could be your logo – if you have one for you profile picture and maybe some of the apparel you have decorated for the cover photo. Give your page a personality.

Consistency is key, but don’t be afraid to change them every few months or every season, and remember to update them all at the same time, if you are using more than one social media platform.

Create Shareable Posts to Create Engaged Followers

Having customers share your posts may be more powerful than having them simply like your page or post. This will spread your message beyond your usual customers and could lead to new customers discovering your business. To create posts that are shareable, consider that emotion is a big factor in what is spread on social media.

Here are the 3 main types of posts that people are most likely to share:

  1. Educational. People love to learn how to make their life easier or to get a glimpse of how you run your business. Create posts or videos on how you create and decorate apparel.
  2. Inspirational. We all need a little inspiration nowadays. Have you recently created shirts for a fundraiser or walk? Share images of those on your page.
  3. Entertainment. Who doesn’t like to be entertained? Amusing posts that make people laugh often do really well on social media. Try creating funny t-shirts or videos to share on social media – and be sure to tag them with your business name.

To keep your posts consistent, look into scheduling your post across platforms with a third party tool, like Hootsuite. It’s always best to use automation for some posts but to add a human touch by responding to comments and authentically interacting with your followers. This also applies to negative or hostile comments. It’s usually best to take those interactions offline or to contact the poster directly through a private message to resolve the issue.

collage of social media icons

Evaluate Your Efforts and Experiment

After you’ve been using social media for a while for your business, it’s good to evaluate its effectiveness, similar to how you would measure your marketing’s success. Often business owners start by looking at their followers and how that number has grown.

While that’s a good place to start, it’s even better to dig a little deeper to measure your engagement. How many people are interacting with your posts? Are they sharing them and reaching new customers for you? Are people going from your posts to your website to make inquiries or place orders?

If not, it might be time to re-think or change up your social media plan. Try out new ideas. The best social media plan is the one that has a basic structure to help you meet your business goals but is flexible enough to allow you to experiment.

Looking to grow your Facebook page? Then, check out this post we did on How to Grow the Facebook Page for Your Apparel Business.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 3 comments
Dealer Services

That’s probably the #1 thing we hear out of customers who have a site, Andrew. We’re planning on doing much more content for this. If there’s ever a particular portion of that topic you’d like us to cover, please leave us a comment or shoot and email to us.

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Drew M.Bowser

Now I know well how to expand business growth all our world by using social media. Thanks for sharing this post!

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Shane McEvoy

Great tips, we’ve used Hootsuite for a long time but another platform worth a mention is Sendible as the queue system we find is quicker.

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