Instagram Basics for Print on Demand Sellers

I recently made a video talking about how to get started on social media for your print-on-demand business specifically on Instagram and Pinterest and in the comments there were a lot of requests to go more in depth on each individual platform so in this video we are going to talk about some different

Posting strategies for Instagram all right I’m going to stay off a video for this one just to make sure you can see everything that you are going to need to see on these screens so if you didn’t catch the first video I would recommend going back and taking a watch

Where I talked about how to get your accounts set up for both Instagram and Pinterest so I will link to that in the corner and in the description if you want to go back and take a look at just the you know couple of steps to get your

Account set up on Instagram couple things I will point out here definitely want to make sure that you have your link in BIO and you need to set this up in the Instagram mobile app not on desktop because they don’t let you do it on desktop and I would recommend if

You’re an Etsy seller especially if you are opted into the share and save program which you can find under marketing and share and save on your Etsy seller dashboard so this is the formatting that you need you need the link that’s the shopname.etsy.com you can copy it from this page you can also

Copy it right from your shop dashboard page in the top right corner there where it says copy link that’s what you want in your link in BIO here unless you have a service like linktree which is the service that creates those landing pages for you so this is just a sample of a

Link tree actually taken right from their website where if you put a link to this if you create a link tree account and you put the link to this page in your Instagram account you can actually have a landing page like this where you have multiple links to direct people to

You know your Etsy shop or other online store your social media accounts all of that kind of stuff and linktree is not the only one there’s lots of Link tree Alternatives out there as well all right now for this video we are going to talk about five different

Instagram post Styles and what they can do for your print on demand business and why I recommend using them all right so let’s start things off with type number one which is a single design post this is the easiest simplest style of Instagram post for your print on

Demand business now there are a couple different ways you can go about making a single design post and for me this is the most common type of post in my Instagram account for my shop and here are two examples here in the Pod insights Instagram page these are single

Image posts so if I open up one of them you’ll see this is not a carousel which means there’s no additional images to swipe through and see so it is just showcasing one image one product one design and this is a mock-up from printify of this product which is a

Garden flag one of the things I do want to point out here is if you look at the description I used for this post it is short and to the point New Garden flag design featuring a warm and patriotic welcome with sunflowers Link in BIO so of course on Instagram you want to

Remind people to go to your bio for the link to your shop because you cannot put a live clickable link in your descriptions and then a few relevant hashtag tags here so nothing about what I said here indicates go buy this now it’s not doesn’t sound like an

Advertisement it’s not like an in your face hey come and buy this from my store so that’s an example of how to promote something from your shop without making it seem like a big in your face advertisement trying to sell something and so let’s actually talk a little bit

More about how to make these single image single item posts now Instagram has a little bit of a hang up when it comes to sharing directly from Etsy so I personally don’t usually do it I usually just take one of the images of my products and either go to the mobile app

On my phone or I will just create a post right here in the left menu on the desktop app of Instagram and just use Instagram to make the post because I’ve usually downloaded at least one or two mock-ups of my new products anyway so I already have them on my computer and

It’s easy enough to just click on Create and then select the image file for my computer however if you do want to try and post directly from Etsy what you can do is come to the marketing Tab and then go to social media and then from there Etsy does recommend some posts usually

It is your newest products that you have either just renewed or just sold or just created so if we wanted to share one of these you can just hover over it and click on share and then it does give you the opportunity to add a caption here as

Well as add hashtags which is nice then if we click on next you’ll see what this does is it gives me the option to click on Instagram and unfortunately you can see it’s already it’s already telling us here you’re gonna need to use the Etsy

Seller app to do this so if I click on post and continue what it’s going to do is say due to our limitations here with Instagram we’re gonna have to complete posting this from our phone so we’re going to get a push notification on our mobile device

But here’s the thing I just opened the Etsy seller app on my phone and that’s what we’re looking at now and if I swipe down here I don’t have any push notifications so even though I went through all those steps and then I clicked done where it said you’re going

To get a push notification on your mobile device this is the phone that I’m signed into the Etsy seller app for the same account I never got to push a notification and so it’s a little bit annoying that you know it doesn’t seem to work at least not consistently it

Hasn’t for me anyway but since we’re here let’s talk about sharing directly from the Etsy seller app what we can do is go to our listings tab here down in the bottom menu and then if I just scroll down I can see my listings so let’s try and share that same product

Here that let there be peace so we’ll click on that one and then you’ll see on the product listing page you can see a share listing option so if we just do that it will now take us to a page where we can select the image we want to share

Now we can’t select multiple so we can only select one so let’s just pick this one here the one that’s more of a quality mock-up and we’ll do next and then on next page it gives you the option to copy the link to the listing which for Instagram doesn’t really make

Any sense because we can’t use a clickable link in an Instagram post so I’m not going to bother doing that I’m just going to click on share in the top right corner now it does give you a little reminder here that you know it might not carry forward what you copied

As far as the link goes because some apps end up clearing the clipboard then it brings you to the menu where you can select which app you want to share it to and I’m going to select Instagram from here and then it’s going to bring up another little menu here where it tells

You which Instagram account you’re using and it lets you select from post story or message as the method for sharing so we’re going to select post and then that will bring up the option for you to add your caption now there’s a downside to doing this because as you write your

Caption here it works fine for writing the caption however when we’re ready to do our hashtags normally what happens on Instagram and either in the Instagram app directly or on the desktop site as you start typing in a hashtag like Peace Day for example normally a menu would

Come up which actually gives you data about the hashtags that are matching what you’re typing and suggested hashtags and it tells you how many posts have been posted for each of the hashtags it doesn’t do that in this little workflow when you share it directly from the seller app so I don’t

Personally like that because I want to see the information about the hashtags I’m using if we just hit OK here then we can hit share and it will post that to my Instagram account now I can go to Instagram and edit the post so that I

Can actually get the hashtags I want so we’ll close out of the Etsy seller app and then we will open the Instagram app and so we’ll go to our profile page here we’ll open this particular post we’ll go to the little three dot menu here and

Then we will go to the edit option now we can edit the description and we can actually see the hashtag information so I’m going to start typing the same hashtag here Peace Day and then you’ll see this menu pop up in the app where now I can see some data and some

Suggested hashtags so I’m going to find ones that look like they’re relevant I’m going to use the one I typed in their peace day because that one looks very relevant but you get the point this was just what I was missing by using that workflow doing it directly from the Etsy

Seller app so if you do that I would recommend coming back into the Instagram app and then editing the post so that you can get your hashtag information that you need so ultimately I don’t really recommend using this method for Instagram it actually works much better

In my opinion for Pinterest so what I like to do instead is just come to my Instagram account come to the left menu on my desktop or from the mobile app depending on which I’m all already using and then just click on Create and then upload one of my product images from my

Mock-ups that I’ve already downloaded and while we’re doing this let’s talk about a slight variation to the single design post and that would be adding multiple images to a single post so let’s click on select from computer and I’m just going to upload three mock-up images that I downloaded from printify

While I was creating a new product so I’ve just uploaded all three of those by selecting them at the same time and so now I’ve got the lay flat mock-up of my image I’ve got a close-up image of the design in context not with a person wearing it and then I’ve got this

Mock-up with two people in the same image now if I click on the bottom right corner of the screen where you see this little stacked image this is going to allow me to re-organize these pictures so I can move the the order of how they

Are displayed so there we go so that has now reorganized my images I can also click on the bottom left corner here to change the aspect ratio now these were already in a one-to-one square aspect ratio coming from printify so I I really don’t need to change anything here but

If you had an image that was one of the other aspect ratios where it was tall or wide you can change it to one to one here and then it will sort of do that sort of classic Instagram one-to-one aspect ratio you can also click on the

Magnifying glass in the left corner here and then use the slider to zoom in if you want to reframe now a lot of this can also be done in the mobile app simply with your finger sort of swipe commands and any type of finger commands that you would use on your phone largely

You’re going to be doing these same things here in the mobile app once we’re good with all of our images we can click on next here and then it’s going to ask us if we want to apply any filters or adjustments and I strongly do not recommend doing any of this with your

Business Instagram account here because for the same reason that you want accurate looking mock-up images in your product listing you want your social media images to also be accurate reflections of the product I’m just going to click next and now we can do our caption and our hashtags now there

Are a ton of different ways you can go about writing descriptions for your posts for this one I’m sort of tending that I’m posting this at the beginning of the summer like maybe in May or early June or something like that and so my my sort of little caption here is heading

On a family vacation this summer we’ve got a design for the whole gang and then I’m going to of course say Link in BIO at the end of that now when it comes to hashtags of course I’m going to start typing hashtag here I’m just going to

Put family vacation and see what I start to get as suggestions of course family vacation is going to have a ton of posts it’s got over five almost six million posts here now there are a couple of very very specifically relevant hashtags here if we look at Family Vacation

Shirts there’s 2 900 that’s something that I definitely will use even though it doesn’t have a super wide reach it is really really relevant to my post so I want to make sure if anybody is viewing any posts that have that hashtag on it I

Want them to see this one because it is as specific as it gets I might also just use the general family vacation hashtag just because family trip would be another one to look for so if you look for family trip that’s going to be another really large uh General hashtag you could possibly

Use now getting a little bit more General I’m going to start looking at hashtags like family shirt or family shirts there’s one with 99 000 posts so I’m going to do family shirts sometimes I’ll even expand out from there and go with something like family hashtag family gifts something like that where

It’s a little it’s still relevant but you know it’s a little bit more General and so once I get up to five maybe six hashtags that’s usually where I stop for my individual post because honestly it gets to a point where it’s just not worth your time to keep going and then

That’s it we’re done with this post we can click on share and for me this is the faster way to do it rather than trying to Fumble around with the you know going direct from Etsy whether it’s desktop or the seller app and so that’s the other way to do your single design

Posts with multiple images displaying it in some different ways all right our next style of Instagram post is themed posts with multiple designs and this one is pretty much exactly what it sounds like so instead of creating a post that is one design even if it’s multiple

Images it is the same design like the family vacation one we just made instead of doing that we’re going to create a post that has sort of a theme to it but it’s showcasing multiple different products or different designs on the same product and again for this one

There are multiple ways you can do it even as I just mentioned you can do one product so for example you could do a themed post that’s all sweatshirts and just show different designs of yours on sweatshirts or you could have a themed post that is about Christmas designs and

Have different Christmas designs on different products and so on there are a lot of different ways to do it but basically the general structure is instead of only focusing on an individual design you’re going to focus on a theme so for this one we’re going to say that my theme is Father’s day

Instead of doing one design we’re going to Showcase a couple different products and design so we’ve got a mug here with living the dad life if we’ve got a t-shirt here with a dad joke on it and so this one is going to be Father’s Day themed instead of just showing off a

Particular design and so naturally I’d be posting this a couple weeks at least prior to Father’s Day and I’m going to go ahead and make this one a little bit more like an advertisement I’m going to use some language that’s a little bit more like trying to get people to shop

So for this one I’m going to say we’ve got something for all dads in your life everyone appreciates a great dad joke especially on Father’s Day and of course Lincoln bio so for this one I’m okay with being a little bit more direct and that I’m encouraging people to shop and

Come take a look at my store and I’m gonna go ahead and do my hashtags here now I’m going to go ahead and do a couple of the real obvious ones like Father’s Day gift or Father’s Day gifts either one of those they’re pretty large hashtags Father’s Day gift ideas it

Would be another good one so I’m gonna go ahead and do that one I’m gonna look for something like Dad gifts as well because you never know could be Father’s Day gifts could be dad gifts gifts for dad how about that 380 000 posts under

Gifts for dad so we’ll try that one too and there we go now we’re up to five hashtags I’m good with that we’ll go ahead and share it the next type of post is going to be a sale or promotion now for a sale or promotion post this is where you’re

Going to need to actually create a design for your post because you need to customize it to show off the information that you’re trying to get across and this is where I absolutely love canva for my social media even if you’re just using the free canva account you have so

Many templates that you can pick from and customize to show off your brand and the sale or the promotion that you’re running I’m going to go ahead and put Instagram sale in the search bar up here at the top and we’re going to see what we get now in the search results right

Now at the top you’re likely noticing there’s a whole bunch of Halloween themed posts here because I’m filming this on September 30th so all I’m going to do is scroll down and just get to some more general ones so as you can see here there’s a couple of general ones

All we’re really going to do here is start looking for ones that might just fit with my brand my theme a little bit better and if you’re noticing the more vertical ones these are templates for your Instagram story which has a different aspect than a regular Instagram post so you can certainly use

Those as well if you want to add a second post basically into your Instagram story to advertise your sale here’s one that I like I’m going to run this Autumn sale and we’ll click on customize this template and now all I have to do is customize my text and

Let’s say maybe my sale that I’m running is 20 off I’m actually going to put the address to my store in the bottom here I’m going to say podinsights.etsy.com okay so we could do something as simple as this and not do anything else however I would recommend

Customizing a little bit more so for example you can add your shop logo if you have that as a separate file either already in canva or something you can upload to canva and then you can also add pages to this just like you can with anything else you make on canva you can

Add a page here and then upload some product mock-up images so this would end up being a carousel post with multiple images where the first one that they see is announcing the sale and then the additional images are just you know whatever products you want to showcase

Case that you know are going to be part of the sale so there are also multiple ways to do the sale or promotion posts and also if you’re running a sale where they need a coupon code definitely put that somewhere in the text in your in

Your post image as well now let’s talk about posting directly from canva because there’s also a little bit of a caveat with Instagram here Instagram just kind of causes some trouble for for integration with other platforms if we go to the share option here in the top

Right corner you’ll see Instagram as one of the choices so if we click on Instagram you can immediately post from the mobile app so basically this is doing something very similar to what Etsy did where it’s going to send us to the mobile app or we can do schedule

Post from desktop notice the notes that are here this says suitable for Instagram personal and Creator if we’re posting it immediately from the mobile app whereas schedule from desktop says suitable for Instagram business and remember our account is an Instagram business account that was part of the

Initial setup we converted it to a business account because it’s not a personal account it’s for our business now the caveat here is if we select schedule the post from desktop which is a very nice feature because you can create this in advance and then schedule

It to go live on the date that you want if we do that hit continue unfortunately we’re gonna have to link our Instagram account to a Facebook page so we cannot use this option unless we have a Facebook page already for our business that basically matches it has to be

Linked to the Instagram account so if you don’t have that if you’re not set up on Facebook and the pages aren’t linked then you’re not going to be able to take advantage of this scheduling option from canva and at the same time if we want to

Do this from the mobile app it’s not going to work because what we have is a business account and this immediately post option doesn’t work if it’s a business account so that’s why it’s got these notes here if we were to open the mobile app right now and try to just do

This immediately post option it would not work it looks like it’s going to work and then it doesn’t at least it has never worked for me since they changed the options to these two so I’m going to go back to the menu for sharing and I’m just going to click download I’m going

To do it as you can do it as a PNG or a JPEG doesn’t really matter but you want to keep it in the aspect ratio that it was that was the template which was 1080 by 1080 we don’t need transparency or anything like that so just click

Download and then we can come back to Instagram and do our create from there and of course you could always add additional product mock-up images as additional images for this post if you want to do that too and now when you’re doing one of these this is where your

Description can be worded a lot more like you know an advertisement because that’s basically what this is you’re advertising a sale so what you want to do in the description is if it’s especially if it’s not in the image already you want to be clear about the

Dates whatever the dates are for this sale or promotion you definitely want to be clear about that in your description we’re running an Autumn sale store wide in our Etsy shop with 20 off your purchase get a head start on your holiday gift shopping sale runs October

1st to the 7th 2023 Link in BIO so there we go very specific about when the sale is running and making sure to connect them back to that Lincoln bio now it comes to hashtags for this this is where your hashtags are going to be kind of a

Mix depending on what you’re posting if you’re only doing one image here we’re just advertising the sale you’re gonna have to go with some more General hashtags such as family gifts it would be a good one gifts for her gifts for him those types of hashtags are what

You’re going to be looking for when you do a post where you’re not showcasing any of these specific products but if we did have additional images in this post with specific designs we could use a few hashtags that are relevant for those images as well so just keep that in mind

The more images you have the more hashtags you’ll probably have to pick from the next type of post that we’re going to talk about is a collage post now a collage post can be basically any of the other types of posts that we’ve been talking about it can be an individual

Design it can be a specific product theme it can be a holiday theme it can really be any type of post but what we’re talking about here specifically is an individual image that is a collage of other images so there’s a lot of templates on canva for this and

Basically the reason why I’m including this in here is just because it gives you the option to share multiple images in a single image so I I do recommend using these so what I like to do personally is I like to use them as the front image or the header image when I

Do a themed post so for example if we go back to Instagram here and we look at the Father’s Day themed post I did the first image in this post is just the living the dad life mug and then we’ve got the second image here with the dad

T-shirt what I would normally do with this post instead of just having one image be in the the front image the one that you first see when you look at the post I would use one of these collage posts and just edit it to put multiple you know Father’s Day or dad themed

Product images in here and then I would add you know of course edit the text here so if I did this if I just said Father’s Day in the middle here and then I changed my images to be four product mock-ups that are Father’s Day this is a

Great way to show off that this post is going to have more than one product image in it so my favorite use for those collage images is really to use them as the header the front image for a post that’s going to have multiple showcasing a particular theme

And the last type of post to talk about is a giveaway or contest post now this obviously is an optional type of post you don’t have to do giveaways or contests or anything like that but this is just another idea for you to generate engagement because one of the things you

Might find with these other types of posts is that you will get some engagement you’ll get some people commenting that they like a design or but you don’t get a ton of engagement on your posts where you’re just you know sharing a single image of a new design

Or something like that where you really can create some engagement on Instagram is running a giveaway or a contest or something like that because of course you’re going to get more people to respond to it so just a thought it’s an option for you you certainly don’t have

To do that I don’t do too many of them with my Instagram account for my print on demand business but what I like to do is if I order a product sample or a few product samples and they turn out well like they they turn out really nice and

It’s not something that I’m interested in keeping then I’ll just run a giveaway for it and all you really need to do is a again come over to canva and search for Instagram giveaway and you’re going to get some relevant templates to use for giveaways and so basically just go

Ahead and pick anything that works well for you if it is a like an individual product so for example this one here we could replace this image of a succulent plant with the product that we’re planning on giving away and then in the description you would want to write how

The giveaway is going to work now that is a whole conversation in itself it can be like this post and leave a comment between this date and this day and then we’ll select one random comment to send the prize now of course that means you

Do have to do the work so you have to come back to the post when the timing is up you have to randomly select one of the comments to win you have to DM that person and ask them for their their shipping information so that you can

Actually send it you can also run giveaways off platform you can actually use services like gleam gleam is one there’s a few other ones out there that will run social media giveaways a lot of them are paid so Services though so if you want to look into that I’ll link to

A couple in the description of this video you know these types of posts they do require some additional work but it’s just another option that can generate some great engagement and also maybe you get rid of some of those samples that are just sitting around all right and

That’s it that is all five types of posts that I personally have used to promote my print on demand business on Instagram definitely mix it up you don’t want every post to seem like an in-your-face advertisement because that is how you get people either to not

Follow your account to begin with OR to unfollow you if they just feel like every post is some type of advertisement asking for a sale and the only other thing I would say is don’t over commit with social media what you want to do is establish a habit something that you can

Do on a regular basis because social media platforms don’t like it when you post and post for a little while and then you stop the platform has an algorithm just like anything else where it’s learning your posting habits in order to promote your posts to followers

And to people who are not your followers so what you want to do is commit to something that you can be consistent with so if that’s posting once a week that’s fine if it’s posting twice a week that’s fine but I wouldn’t recommend you know setting a goal for yourself of

Posting every single day multiple times a day because you might do that for a week or something and then sort of Trail off from there and the algorithm on these platforms it’ll just never really catch on to what you’re doing because you’re not being consistent just do

Something that you can stick with all right that’s going to do it for this video I hope you found it helpful let me know down in the comments if it was and also let me know if you have any questions about promoting your print-on-demand business on Instagram as

Well don’t forget to hit that like button if it was helpful for you and subscribe to the Pod insights Channel if you haven’t already thanks everybody see you next time