We all have to start from scratch to launch our own businesses as freelancers, and in today’s world, social media is the gateway. It can be challenging to gain followers and engagement to make your page appear professional. Has anyone taken on this challenge and is willing to share their knowledge?
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Followers are over rated. So is social media. It’s one tool of many in getting your work in front of potential clients. It’s clients that matter. Quite honestly I couldn’t care less how many followers you have, and maybe, if you are spending so much time and money on ‘finding’ them, you aren’t devoting yourself to your work.
(Que the link to buy followers here.)
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now this is a helpful reply thank you !
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I don’t see the logic behind this viewpoint. Followers are people who are already familiar with you and follow you because they enjoy reading and seeing your posts. Potential clients don’t follow businesses on the off chance that they might need a graphic designer, plumber, or dentist.
Social media posts and accounts don’t typically show up in search engine queries. Only your friends and family will find you on social media, and they won’t form a solid base of potential clients.
At best, social media is an adjunct to other types of marketing — a place to refer potential clients for additional information from a website or a site for potential clients to do a bit of research on you once they’ve found out about you through other means, such as your website, word-of-mouth, and various other promotions and marketing efforts.
I’m not saying social media isn’t valuable as an additional way of reinforcing other marketing efforts. Still, I don’t think it’s the “gateway” or the primary means to put yourself in front of new potential clients.
That said, if you can attract 100,000 social media followers, doing so will create enough reach to attract new clients as you become famous within an expanding circle of followers. However, reaching that goal of becoming a social media influencer is not a particularly promising way to launch a career because the chances are you’ll fail — especially when starting out as a designer and not having anything that sets you apart in ways that warrant the interest of all those potential followers.
Launching a graphic design business is a classic Catch-22 situation. Finding new clients is difficult without, first, having clients and the work to show for it. Starting a new design business is a slow process of leveraging past experience and connections gained from university schooling and working as a beginning designer for various employers. Without those prerequisites, launching a successful design business is very difficult unless you’re incredible at self-promotion and enormously talented.
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Social media strategies might be a more effective for illustrators and painters with distinctive styles than for graphic designers. They’ll get followed by people who like their specific style. Graphic designers are like chameleons who shift styles throughout the day, depending on what project is in front of them.
The best types of clients are local. You can meet them face to face, IRL, tour their business as they tell you about their needs, and take them out for coffee to discuss how you can solve their problems. Those are the types of clients you’ll keep for years with greater ease. And you’ll be able to charge a better rate. If you want to succeed as a freelancer, you need to be good at establishing and maintaining relationships, and that’s always easier to do in person with people in your community, than it is over the internet with randos.
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i realy thank you for saying all thiss, i saw other graphic designers doing that but i forgot that thhey already worked with clients before and then went wwith social media.
this reply helped me thank you again.
i dontt know why i wasent thinking that way you are 100% right. again thank guys
To get more subscribers, try creating interesting content.
So you can be popular on social media – for whatever that’s worth? Great!
I’d much rather be employed and have my invoices paid than have thousands of followers. It’s all very vacuous and meaningless.
Welcome aboard, by the way! I’m not always this ascerbic. The whole social media thing pushes my buttons.
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hahahahaha no problem
and thank you anww!
yes i am tryingg
thank youu
Yesterday While I was playing with my friends, one of them had a very nice looking avatar and banner, after the game ended, I asked him who made those , and he told me that one of his own friends has a discord server where he does them, and this is an example of how he promote his work
You can’t earn a living creating Banners and Avatars.
Discord is more of a group chat, not really a place to do business, though some illustrators I know there do hire out on commission. It’s not their day-job though. And most of them have a presence on Deviantart too. And Twitch. But they’re illustrators, not Graphic Designers.