How do small creative businesses benefit from making use of social networks?

Abstract

Although there are concerns that premeditated and calculated authenticity on social media can cause creative small business to lose their connection with community, self-branding can also strengthen community ties and brand loyalty with customers. This paper seeks to explore how creative businesses are able to succeed by utilising social networks and marketing techniques to make their businesses more publicly visible. These include the use of virtual studios for connection and collaboration with other creatives, self-branding and marketing though Instagram and Pinterest, as well as the utilisation of blogs to reach out to people both within the industry and out of it. The key idea behind the success of this three-way methodology is that small businesses benefit by giving a relatable face to their product. Research indicates that authenticity directly correlates to success in the social media marketplace (Maguire, 2019, p. 15) and a creative business that is able to portray a real person living and working to create consumer able products is more likely to have customer support and longevity.

Introduction

Although there are concerns that premeditated and calculated authenticity on social media can cause creative small business to lose their connection with community, self-branding can also strengthen community ties and brand loyalty with customers.

 We live in an age of endless consumerism, where capitalism and mass advertising have been shown to reap huge financial benefits for big businesses. Trends are forecast, personal data is mined and celebrities and influencers dictate where and how we might choose to spend our money. But sift through the loudest and brashest of these businesses and sitting quietly, but comfortably, is the small creative business. It seems almost miraculous that our creative citizens; the artists, writers, potters, woodworkers etc., are able to exist at all, let alone thrive. But thrive they do, and a lot of their success can be attributed to the use of the Internet (Monahan, Shah, & Mattare, 2011, p.122) and the practice of social media networks such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

These networks have the ability to amplify the ‘word of mouth’ small business strategies of old (Goodman,2012, p. 20). This paper seeks to explore how creative businesses are able to succeed against the odds by utilising the various affordances of specific social networks to make their businesses more publicly visible. These include the use of virtual studios for connection, self-branding and marketing though Instagram and Pinterest, as well as the prolific diary entry/behind the scenes utilization of blogs to reach out to people both within the industry and out of it. The key idea behind the success of this three-way methodology is that small businesses benefit by giving a relatable face to their product. Research indicates that authenticity directly correlates to success in the social media marketplace (Maguire, 2019, p. 15) and a creative business that is able to portray a real person living and working to create consumer able products is more likely to have customer support and longevity.

Connection and Creativity

Social networks have the ability to connect creatives across the world through virtual studios, encouraging collaboration and customer visibility across various spectrums. Creative workplaces vary from company to company, person to person. Where some might encourage large groups of people all working on one project, others might have individuals working on separate ideas, but in a communal space, whilst yet another workplace might be relatively isolated with one person being the sole provider of creative output (Budge, 2013, p. 15-16). According to Henry James in his study of the writer Nathanial Hawthorne, the creative development of someone can be extraordinarily stunted by the stereotypical notion of an ‘artists isolation’ (Budge, 2013, p. 15). This suggests that connection, either collaboratively or communally, can greatly benefit creative practices and inspiration. Physical limitations in regards to studio spaces, distance, communication difficulties etc. have all become a thing of the past (Johnston, 2013, p. 20). Fast developments made with new technologies have enabled the creation of virtual communities that take place across various social networks (Budge, 2013, p. 16).

Different platforms offer different means of connection dependent on their unique affordances, hence why the virtual studio encompasses a range of them. A virtual studio is a broad term used to describe the practice of creatives in regards to interactive technology and individual studio practices, often within many different social media networks (Budge, 2013, p. 16).

Blogs

Blogs are an important aspect of the virtual studio, they can become more than just a portfolio of work for the creative business with the affordance of comments, liking, and the ability to share links to individual posts or pieces of work (Davis & Chouinard, 2017, p. 1), they become more like an online social contact list for both other creatives as well as the potential client or customer (Papacharissi, 2007, p. 21). Blogs allow for new ways of interaction, communicating a dichotomous menagerie of both individual creative documentations, as well as communication with customers and peers. It can also be used as a way of promoting both your own business as well as those of others, creating motivation and inspiration, as well as ‘enabling a sense of community, a sharing of creative practice and support for the creative work of others to develop and flourish’ through the use of longer, more detailed posts (Budge, 2013, p. 18).

Twitter

Twitter on the other hand acts as a form of microblogging on a much smaller and quicker scale, with feedback and interaction in the virtual world coming in thick and fast. Like the blog, Twitter allows the small business owner to document their creative process from start to finish through the use of text and images, however it allows for a quicker turnaround of information (Budge, 2013, p. 18) and a more responsive feeling of being ‘in studio’ with their followers. According to Budge, Twitter is useful as a way to seek feedback from others about her creative process, or related topics, without the need and time to publish and monitor and a full-length blog post (Budge, 2013, p. 18). Although its useful to link both the blog and Twitter feeds together to create more well-rounded engagement (Wright-Porto, 2011, p. 207). Twitter allows the creative business to give a sense of day by day life and offline tangibility to the product they are trying to sell, and business they are trying to market.

Instagram

Instagram is a vast and important tool for the creative business, not only does it contribute to the virtual studio experience and portfolio, but it’s affordances make it easy to create a sense of community around the business. In many cases Instagram can very quickly become the hub of almost all virtual traffic for the business (Alkhowaiter, 2016, p.59). The community scenario can also take place on Twitter to a certain extent, as both platforms utilise the hashtag tool which group similar content together enabling people to find accounts of interest simply and easily (Abrams, 2016, p. 2). How Instagram has become so useful to the small creative business lies with its interactive features. The invaluable ability to keep customers up to date with day to day occurrences including shopping information, sales etc., can be done through the stories feature which lasts for only 24 hours. This enables virtual potential consumers to feel included and knowledgeable about how the business is operating. The marketplace feature allows a business to feature its products and pricing within their Instagram account, without the user having to leave platform. This is an important feature as allows for the customer to browse for purchases without the need for a linked website, which for many small businesses is often too expensive to run and set up (Alkhowaiter, 2016, p.59), at least within its earlier days. Equally important are the location services which enable a user to find out where a physical business might be located (Alkhowaiter, 2016, p.59), as well as the tagging facility which helps spread and market products across the platform when a user tags the business on their own account for all their followers to see.

Self- branding

Self-branding can be a powerful way of creating a supportive community behind a small business. The use of social networks means that such communities can be spread out throughout the world, a virtual community if you will. However, when this virtual community invests in very real creative products or as Johnston put it ‘real word connections become offline ones, and vice versa’ (Johnston, 2013, p. 25), the evidence of such connection manifests in tangible monetary success. By creating the self as the face and story behind a brand, it becomes more personal, relatable and almost functions as a valued individual within a community.

Self- branding however is often unpaid labour that must function in order to market the brand and product itself. The technologically able creative must be constantly thinking and working towards marketing themselves as the face of their work, in this way it is often a consequence that the very existence of an individual becomes built around their work and creative output (Duffy, 2015, p. 3). According to Delanty, user-generated online content has transformed how modes of production and consumption function (Delanty, 2018, p. 203). Simple buying and selling based on need or want is no longer quite so simple and in today’s digital economy, the small creative business must pay attention as to how it markets itself.

The success of self-branding can be attributed towards the relatively new ‘attention economy’ where it is the goal is to make the objects of our attention ‘calculable, predictable and hence monetizable’ (Turner, 2018, p. 334). The attention of an audience is inescapable if marketing through social networks, however it is important to bear in mind that the audience is never a singular group of individuals omnipresent across platforms (Scolere, Pruchniewska & Duffy, 2018, p.5). It is truer to say that the demographic of each platform varies and as such, if attention is to be maintained, then a certain amount of variance within the brand must also take place (Scolere, Pruchniewska & Duffy, 2018, p.5).

Authenticity.

This then brings into question the concept of authenticity, if the branding of the business must morph to fit within the audience of each platform, how then can it present itself as a cohesive, personal and relational business worth supporting and having a community? If the small business is busy marketing itself in accordance to modern marketing strategies in order to grow its digital reputation with credibility and status to sell its products, does it lose its authenticity, as well as the intimacy of knowing who is creating these products? It has to be said that self- branding, although effective for the small business, is a form of ‘calculated authenticity’ (Scolere, Pruchniewska & Duffy, 2018, p.7). According to Pooley, creatives who used Instagram to market their products had created a curated and polished version of themselves that had the feel of authenticity, but was more truthfully a professional façade employed according to their audiences’ considerations (Pooley, 2010, p.79). However, I see this form of digital self-branding practice as not the negative it might be painted as, but merely akin to the professionalism that is indeed expected, when a customer walks through the door of a physical business and is greeted by a member of staff. The virtual marketplace is still new territory and the self- brand cannot hope to ever be both wholly authentic whilst also professional across all platforms (Scolere, Pruchniewska & Duffy, 2018, p.7). If we consider that authenticity celebrates the individual motivations behind a business or brand then surely it stands to reason that we accept how a small business attempts to put their best foot, or face as it were, forward in order to market its products. 

Conclusion.

Conclusively, the small business has never had more opportunity to flourish with the continuous evolution and reliance on social networks and communities. Social networks such as Instagram and Twitter bring like-minded people together. Creatives and their associated small business are able to interact, collaborate and communicate. They find inspiration and creative motivation across these platforms and join together in blogs to discuss topics, interests and their own elements of work. Innovation, entrepreneurship and artistic endeavours all function better within a socially active group, and Web 2.0 has opened the doors to virtual communities. These platforms are not just for the creatives themselves however, over time they have become important marketing tools enabling the function of small businesses to flourish both internationally, and within their local spheres, as they learn to utilise platform affordances and self-branding techniques.

References

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