Building an Online Presence

Since the first day, social media influence has been a priority for us. We want potential customers to stay updated with our journey and for possible endorsers to know how we’ve progressed.

At the beginning, Twitter and Instagram were important tools for us to promote ourselves. On Twitter we could tweet about our progress; from our first logo design to getting our book printed and bound, our twitter documented our whole journey. We made sure to keep our audience engaged with our tweets by posting jokes and hand lettered quotes. We also tweet about events we take part in to let our followers know where and when they can buy our products. We have managed to get into contact with Trishna Thakrar and Karthik Nagesan from BBC’s The Apprentice 2016 and they were able to give us very useful marketing and sales techniques! We frequently use hashtags to reach a wider audience. Successful writers like NGK, author of the hugely successful Harry the Happy Mouse and Shana Gorian author of Rosco the Rascal have promoted us on their twitter accounts and frequently show their support.

While Twitter is a great platform to promote ourselves to other entrepreneurs and business people, we found that Instagram lets us update others our own age as well as the wider market about our product. Through some research we found that Instagram accounts with themed feeds tend to amass a larger following as it’s considered more aesthetically appealing so we decided to start our own, from the pictures of our current feed it’s easy to see we follow a pattern: photo, handlettered quote, photo, handlettered quote etc. Our handlettered quotes allow us to show off our creativity even further and use more hashtags such as #art #lettering and therefore help us gain followers. We’ve had Instagram accounts with followings as large as 100,000 shout us out to their followers and so we’ve gained some ourselves. In five months, we’ve amassed a large following of 320 followers and we can only expect that number to grow. Instagram allows us to keep in touch with a large variety of people.

We’ve had a Facebook page for around 3 months. As our book is targeted towards young children, we thought we should make a good first impression on the people who actually buy the books; the parents. Through some research, we found out that Facebook was the platform most parents use. Facebook allows us to schedule events as well as invite others. It is easy to share a page as well. We found that Facebook allows us to share a lot of information about our company as there is no character limit unlike Twitter and Instagram.

Overall, we have a collective 503 followers across all three platforms and we average around 450 views on all of our Instagram posts. We are confident that our pages will continue to grow and we are looking forward to sharing our journey with more and more people.

Our social media pages are as follows

Twitter: twitter.com/16fireflies_ye

Instagram: instagram.com/16fireflies_ye

Facebook: facebook.com/16firefliesye/