I finally started Substacking (if such a verb can exist) a couple of months ago. I’d heard about Substack, and I’d seen friends and colleagues starting their Substack newsletters, and I’d been told by marketing specialists that they didn’t understand why I wasn’t using Substack, and finally Substack contacted me themselves to find out if they could help us with any questions we had.
Meanwhile we were finding that no matter the number of followers we had on other social media platforms our posts weren’t likely to be shared unless they had little to do with the work we use social media to share. I recently posted a picture of my incredibly resilient Mum on Instagram as a test to see if I was right, and Mum, Googie, got over 4,000 likes and 265 comments: very nice, but I’m not selling my Mum, I’m selling cut flowers and foliage, workshops and demos, and increasingly membership of the fab Club which we’d grown over on YouTube over the past few years.
Not only were the other platforms not showing our work to the people who have followed, but we were having to send our followers from one platform to another to see posts which suited different platforms. The platforms hate that: they’ll do anything to keep people on their apps and not encourage them to leave. Again, posts not showing up.
Furthermore our newsletter platform, Klaviyo, was becoming more and more expensive to use. We were persuaded to move to Klaviyo by Klaviyo, and for a few years it was fine - but it’s a system really set up for much more complicated businesses than ours. For John Lewis I imagine it’s brilliant, for our small business it’s over-engineered and as a result costly.
What I was looking for was a place where the newsletter could be hosted, and a place where we could post a variety of content for people who’ve signed up for that newsletter and so are very interested in what we have to say and do. Enter Substack. Meanwhile the old social media platforms have set up a system where the platform is always a barrier between the person posting and the person potentially seeing the posts - there’s no way to get through that barrier without begging for email addresses, so that should the old social media platform stop sharing one’s work entirely, all those people to whom one’s been chatting all these years just disappear off the radar of a small business like ours.
So here’s a little clip about why Substack so far is working well for us, the things I like about it, the reasons it’s good value for the paid subscribers as well as good value for Common Farm Flowers.
Enjoy! This is a free post and I hope you find it interesting as well as feel encouraged to join up to the Common Farm Flowers Club.
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