Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, local marketing tips, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
ive always been very apprehensive as to whether or not sign up to the likes of ,MYSPACE, FACEBOOK,TWITTER as i feel a little exposed personally.I do feel encouraged though at the possible market from signing up and using these correctly. thanks for the info
Exactly, for example, I tried to follow 200 followers of a t-shirt company to try and see what approximate percentage would follow me back.
I had a quick turnaround of about 30% immediately. I have been posting several times a day and I have not yet posted a single adverisement, rather I have tried to keep it interesting for people to follow.
Now the bad news. I would say that 90-95% of my followers are spammers. Even the ones that randomly post "what they are doing" every 3-5 posts comes the spam. So that just tells me they are spammers/adveritsers trying to fool people into following them.
I personally think twitting is a great waste of time. "PLEASE I DONT MEAN TO OFFEND ANYONE THAT ENJOYS IT, THATS JUST HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT"
However, my ultimate goal would be to promote my brand, but under no sirumstances do I want to fall into the category of one of those "con-artist" that post a few times than hit you with the commercial.
I guess what I m trying to say is. I congratulate those of you who are making tweeter work for you. As of me, I am not going to give up just yet due to the incredible testimonies on this forum.
But from my personal experience, spamming does not work. At least to me. As soon as I see an e-mail's subject "50% off, great offer, free stuff, etc, etc, etc..." I just delete it without even opening it. And I m doing the same thing on tweeter, as soon as somebody starts bombarding me with commercial after commercial, i just unfollow them.
I wish I could post a picture of what my Homepage on Tweeter looks like. Is like every post has a link to something! Even the ones that dont, usually have a link every so many post.
I dont mean to rant, like I said congrats to those that have made it work and hopefully i ll crack it and make work for me.
There's only one steadfast rule to tweeting that I've learned while on it.
Be genuine.
Even if it's a company twitter account people don't follow others just to get advertisements on a regular basis, this just. They want relevant info related to your world. Tweet about what interests you; be it funny links, tshirt news, retweeting others funny/interesting posts or even other tshirt companies you like as long as you post as yourself and aren't trying to sell people will respect that you are genuine and eventually look into you a bit more, where they then will check your site.
There's nothing wrong with posting up new designs and doing contests, these are both viable posts to do just keep it genuine and connect with the people who actually are interested in reading what you have to say. You'll even find the people who enjoy your posts will market for you and RT your own posts!
People new to twitter will run into the spam accounts, they are getting quite ingenious in their content to make themselves look real but don't worry about follower numbers, you want other genuine people. These spam accounts use greasemonkey spam follow scripts to follow other spam lists so the more spammers you have in your list the more chance another one will follow you. When in doubt of the authenticity of someone following you just don't follow them back. In most cases the spammers will unfollow you after a couple weeks anyways (using the same script). All they want are numbers so don't give in.
I don't think spammers are too much of a problem on twitter.99% of them are pretty obvious so you can easily tell who not too follow and if they follow you then there's no harm. Then again I usually only get a couple of new followers a day so can easily filter them out, if you're getting dozens of followers it may be a bit more time consuming.
A local radio DJ here in Vancouver posted up a very concise way for businesses to operate on Twitter. I fully agree with what he says as he lays out the fact that it's not about the number of followers you have but the number of followers who WANT to follow you for a genuine reason. This is just a link to an article, not promoting anything.
A local radio DJ here in Vancouver posted up a very concise way for businesses to operate on Twitter. I fully agree with what he says as he lays out the fact that it's not about the number of followers you have but the number of followers who WANT to follow you for a genuine reason. This is just a link to an article, not promoting anything.
Thanks, useful article. I am by no means a Twitter expert. Just started messing around with it 2 or 3 weeks ago. I am thinking about putting a link from our web site which draws pretty fair traffic to Twitter then show back links to specific specials/new products.
My one issue with Twitter is time. Time spent on it is time I am not spending working on other things. I also get easily distracted by just about anything. So, all the sudden an hour has passed and I am still following tweets about something for which I have suddenly developed a fascination.
Surprisingly, there are not very many threads about twitter, and the ones that do exist simply ask whether or not it is useful, for the most part. I'll discuss my personal experiences and I hope you will join me in the discussion.
Like many of you, I have a small (online) clothing company, which I started just a few months ago. I was desperate for exposure and fans at the time, so I created accounts for Myspace, Facebook, and twitter. I was most familiar with Myspace, so Facebook and twitter fell by the wayside. Now that things are finally slowing down, I figured it would be a great time to pump up social marketing again, so I decided to try out twitter.
Over the past few weeks, I have had few website sales, few mailing list signups, and generally 20-30 visitors a day. In just two days, twitter totally turned this around. My technique, which many consider to be "spamming", involved following hundreds, and eventually thousands, of people on twitter. I do not consider this spamming, because of the negative connotation, but simply organized mass-marketing.
Here are a couple of thoughts on the subject:
1) I only follow people who have aligned interests. If somebody is following a big streetwear brand, for example, I assume that they are a fan of streetwear and could also be a fan of my brand as well. I will follow them, and they might follow me back. Since I am trying to build a local fanbase, I also follow people in my geographical area.
2) Some people don't like the idea of following hundreds of strangers, and they do not see any benefit. In my opinion, this is totally wrong. These "strangers" represent the potential market. By following them, you can get a feel for what they are into and what's hot in your target demographic. They will often post updates about what they like and what they do not like.
3) Sometimes it takes a little "push" for people to start recognizing your brand. You can't just sit around and hope the word spreads. You may have the best brand in the entire world, but it will inevitably fail if nobody knows about it. Tell the world. When you follow somebody, they will probably follow you back. This allows them to know what's going on with your brand, visit your website, check out your designs, etc.
4) Twitter is great for feedback. People like to answer questions. Earlier today, I posted the question "What do you think of my designs?" and got great responses - some negative, and some positive, but all helpful.
5) People tend to follow somebody if their friend is following them. This is sort of like internet "word-of-mouth" marketing. The more people that are following you, the more presence you have, and the greater potential for more fans.
6) If somebody sees your brand on twitter, they may check it out and write about it on their blog, facebook, etc. Their readers could become followers and potential fans of the brand as well. Once again, more presence = more potential.
The way I see it, it's all about getting the word out there. In the past few days, I have followed over 2,000 people, gained 400 followers and counting, connected with the target market, had 500 hits to my website (a little more than the average 20-30 a day), made numerous sales, and and many mailing list signups. On top of that, I've found lots of interesting people and new brands, and this is only the beginning.
These thoughts generally apply to brand with an online presence, but local shops and boutiques could use similar techniques to promote themselves.
What are your thoughts?
How do you know if the person you are following has an interest in your type of products?
Last edited by Solmu; August 24th, 2009 at 01:17 AM.
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Re: using twitter to promote your brand 
Re: using twitter to promote your brand 
