Is Social Media the Best Use of Your Time as a Handmade Business Owner?
Social Media Reality
My Perspective May Be Different
Since starting MONOLISA in 2017, I have taken a different approach to social media than many handmade business owners. Like many handmade business owners, I knew I needed some type of online presence. I created social media accounts to share photos, behind-the-scenes moments, and updates about where customers could find me at upcoming art shows and festivals. But from the beginning, I also questioned whether social media would deliver the return many people claimed it would. Part of that perspective came from my previous career.
Before launching MONOLISA, I spent more than twenty years working in e-commerce, website development, SaaS technology, online marketing, and digital strategy. I was used to looking at website traffic, customer acquisition, conversion rates, analytics, marketing performance, and long-term growth. Because of that experience, I have always looked at marketing differently. I was never focused only on likes, followers, or vanity metrics. I wanted to know whether something was reaching my target customer, generating real interest, building long-term value, and leading to sales.
The Questions I Kept Coming Back To
"What is right for my business, my customers, my energy, and my long-term goals?"
Social Media Can Work, But It Has a Cost
For some businesses, social media can absolutely be effective. It depends on what you are trying to promote, what you sell, how often you post, how well your content reaches your target market, and whether you have the time or advertising budget to support it. Higher-priced handmade pieces can also be more challenging to sell directly from social media than lower-priced items. In many ways, social media follows the same reality as selling at art shows and festivals: you have to play to play.
When I see creators online receiving thousands of likes and comments, I often wonder how much time went into the photography, video editing, captions, posting, responding, learning platform changes, and keeping up with the algorithm. Many makers spend ten or more hours every week creating content. That may sound reasonable until you do the math. Ten hours a week becomes forty hours a month, nearly five hundred hours a year, and thousands of hours over the life of a business.
What Else Could You Build?
If I had ten extra hours every week, I would not spend them creating more social media content. Instead, I invested those hours into building MONOLISA as a handmade brand.
Over the years, my focus went into learning new skills, improving my craftsmanship, designing more advanced collections, creating a wider variety of price points, meeting customers face-to-face, listening to in-person feedback, building online collections, improving my website, creating videos, writing blog articles, sending monthly newsletters, and studying my business analytics.
For me, social media came last. That does not mean it was unimportant. It simply was not where I believed my limited time would create the greatest long-term value.
"Instead of building my business around an algorithm, I focused on creating better products, stronger customer relationships, and website content I could continue improving year after year."
Real Results
Every art show gave me opportunities to meet new customers and learn directly from people interacting with my work. Those conversations helped me understand what customers responded to, what they were looking for, and how I could continue improving my collections.
At one fine art show, a woman came into my booth and told me she had looked at several artists’ websites before attending. She said many of them did not show much of their work or pricing online. By the time she arrived at my booth, she already knew which MONOLISA collection interested her. She purchased more than $500 in pieces that day.
Another customer visited my booth, took a business card, and did not buy anything at the show. Later, she went to my website, watched my behind-the-scenes videos, and realized I made the pieces myself. She returned to another event and became a customer. Those are the kinds of results that matter to me. They show how in-person connection, website content, customer education, videos, and storytelling can work together.
I have had a couple of sales connected to social media, but one was already an existing customer and the other person knew me from my earlier professional life. My strongest results have come from my website, monthly newsletter, art shows, customer relationships, organic search, and people who take the time to learn more about my work.
I track my data through Shopify and Google Analytics, and for my business, the pattern has been clear: building my website and staying connected with customers through my newsletter has created more long-term value than chasing social media reach.
Owning vs. Renting
As a handmade artist selling one-of-a-kind handbags and jewelry, I chose a path that worked better for my business goals. I use social media primarily to share my process, document my journey, and let customers know where they can find me. I do not try to turn it into my primary sales channel.
One of the reasons I chose to spend more time building my website comes down to a simple idea: ownership. When you build a website, you are creating something you own. Every blog article, product page, behind-the-scenes video, educational resource, and customer story becomes part of something that can continue growing over time.
I also use my website to show the long, detailed process behind some of my MONOLISA pieces. For example, there are 14 steps that go into making MONOLISA earring jackets. In my process videos, I show what it actually takes to make detailed pieces by hand, from the early shaping stages to the finished design.
That kind of content gives readers and viewers a chance to learn about the artist behind the work. It helps people understand the time, skill, problem-solving, and personal story behind each piece. For anyone who wants to know more about my journey beyond the designs, I also share personal stories here: The Personal Side of MONOLISA.
The Trade-Off
Social media feels different to me. You create a post, the platform shows it to some people, and then it quickly gets buried. A few days later, the algorithm has already moved on to the next post, the next video, the next trend, and the next creator.
That does not mean social media is bad. It can be useful for updates, connection, visibility, and sharing your creative process. I still use it for those reasons. I simply chose to focus first on advancing my skills, improving my craftsmanship, creating stronger collections, developing customer relationships, growing my website, and building a solid business foundation.
As a business grows, the best use of your time may change. Once you have developed your skills, built a strong customer base, created effective systems, and established a solid foundation, investing additional effort into social media may make more sense.
Every business is different, but for MONOLISA, investing in my website, customer relationships, educational content, and long-term resources has created more value than chasing social media reach. Those assets continue working for me long after a post disappears from a feed.
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