Can You Still Build Your Crochet Business On Social Media in 2026?

Hello, and welcome to the Crochet Business School podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Thomas, and today I thought we'd talk about social media and if it's still possible to build your crochet business on social media platforms with all the changes that have been happening with the algorithms and how they work. So let's get into it. So the major benefit about using social media to build your business is that, one, it's free, and two, they are used by millions upon millions of people across the world, which means there's a huge audience there waiting to find you.

But social media is now not what it was. Over the last couple of years, it's changed massively. The change started further back than that, but really it's the last couple of years where it's really impacted small businesses. And then over the last year, even more so.

So things started changing once video started arriving, and this was on the back of Instagram Reels. Video changed the game. The Reels became really popular. On the back of that came TikTok and all of the very short form videos that have exploded in popularity.

And these videos changed how social media started working. And now video is king. It's the most viewed form of content on social media platforms. Every social media platform now has the ability to load these TikTok style videos on their platforms, and they reward people who use them.

But social media used to be what it said, about being social. But these videos removed that element. It's now no longer about the chat, it's about how long the videos are viewed for. Which means that they've turned from social media into entertainment media.

So if you can't entertain your audience, you're going to struggle. If you cannot create videos that hold people's attention and watch them, you're going to struggle. It's gotten very bad for businesses. Now, the thing to note is these platforms were not made for businesses.

They were made for ordinary people to chat and get to know each other, make friends online. It's just that small business like ours, we found a way to use it to our benefit. And for years, social media let us do that for free. We could create profiles and business pages- completely free and build massive audiences.

And at the beginning, it was really easy. You could build a large following very quickly and grow your business very fast. It's changed. Now these social media platforms are owned by shareholders, so they've got to make the money, and they do that with ads.

When it comes to businesses, it's done with ads, and they want you to pay to play. So it's become a thing of you either entertain and keep people on the platform, or you pay for ads, and that's the only way to get reach. And for us, that is a nightmare. It's so, so difficult now to get your post seen.

And in December, I actually left Facebook for Crochet Business School. I'm still on there for my pattern business, Froggity Frog, but only for my group. I stopped posting on the page because there was no point. The reach was nonexistent.

And actually, in my group, I've got twenty-seven hundred people in the group, and I'm still only getting reach of maybe a hundred people per post. It's really, really bad right now. And every small business I've spoken to has the same problem. Meta has brought in different tools, so Facebook and Instagram, you can now mon-monetize your content more easily.

But again, how much you make, it depends on how much you can entertain, how many views your content gets, how many comments your content gets. And because the reach is so small, it's really difficult to do. I have for a long time said you need a social media presence. You do need somewhere online where your audience can find you and connect with you, and social media still serves that purpose.

But if you're hoping to build your business and get sales through a social media platform, it's much more difficult. Unless you already have an established presence, unless you already have a big audience, unless you're willing to spend a lot of time creating content that entertains and engages, you're going to struggle. Facebook, Instagram, they are the two main problems. TikTok is still doing okay, but there's a lot of people leaving it because of who's bought it and all the controversy in the US around who owns it and where it's based.

But that is a, it's a video app. You have to make videos. It's the same problem. You have to entertain, you have to engage, and unless your videos do that, you're going to struggle.

It's - the landscape has changed. It's not what it was, and you either have to be prepared to spend a lot of money on ads, or you've got to play the new game, and that means completely changing your strategy as to what it would've been just a couple of years ago. It's not easy. It's not easy right now.

Um, but it's about finding what works for you. I think now more than ever, it's really important to build your newsletter list. It's the easiest way to communicate with your audience. But to get people on your list in the first place, getting onto platforms where you get found on Google is more important.

Now, Meta did bring out an update which says that Facebook posts, Instagram posts can now get found in Google searches. To be honest, I've not seen that kind of content turn up in my Google search results. I'm not seeing Facebook and Instagram posts turn up in my feed for, for Google searches. So I'm not sure how effective that's being right now.

I mean, if you have seen different, then please let me know, 'cause I would love to know how much this is working. I haven't seen it myself. Maybe you have. But let me know in the comments, please, because if that's true and if it is happening, then if you SEO your posts, you've got a chance.

But if it, it's not happening, and if n- you know, these posts are not appearing in Google searches, then you've got a big problem. You need to get found in search results, and that means going onto third-party platforms like Etsy, like Shopify, um, Payhip will also do that. Platforms with blogs in them can do a lot of work for you. Blogs take work.

Uh, I'm not going to deny that. They do take work, but so do social media now. You can spend hours a day on your social media just to get a decent portion of your post being seen by a significant number of your audience. And so now it comes down to which platform is going to give you the best return on your time, and we get stuck in doing what we've always done.

It was a very big decision for me to leave Facebook. I agonized it, over it for weeks, but actually, once I did shut it down, I felt a big relief. But I also already had other ways to reach my audience. I've got this podcast.

I've got my newsletter. The two things were already established. But if you don't have another platform set up, it's a really big jump to make because you've gotta start again on a different platform, and that's a massive leap of faith. But with the amount of time that being on social media right now takes, do you have the time to build another platform before you leave the one that's not working right now?

It's a big gamble, and I'm not gonna deny that. Going onto a new platform, you have to learn it all over again. The current audience you have on social media may not move with you. So I set up on Substack for my daily posts, and majority of my Facebook followers did not move to Substack.

In fact, virtually none of them did. But that's their choice. They first found me on Facebook. People don't want to use a different platform because remember, the people who follow us may not be business owners.

They may not want to learn to use a different app, learn to use a different platform, and that's their choice. We cannot force them to go over with us. It means that we have to build afresh, which is scary. But if a platform isn't working for you now anyway, what have you got to lose?

Yes, it's a wrench. We have spent so much time on these platforms that it's hard to walk away. It's hard to give up all that work. But if it's also not bringing you sales, what are you really giving up?

You know, admitting something's not working is not a failure. It's just admitting that things have changed, and you need to move on. It's a business strategic s- decision, and this is where we have to start thinking as business owners rather than our emotional attachment to what's come before. Things change in the world all the time, and we either change with it or we kind of shrink away into the shadows.

And if something is not working for you, if it's not bringing you the sales, and if it's not bringing you any engagement from an audience who could make - bring you sales in the future, then it's not working. If you start growing your crochet business on these platforms and you simply struggle to build an audience and you struggle to make any sales whatsoever, it's not working. And you can either say, "It's because of the content I'm producing, the content I'm putting out. I'm just not doing it right," or you can say, "This is how the platform works for businesses now.

It's clearly not on our side anymore unless we pay a fortune for ads, which I can't afford to do." It's time to choose a different platform. You can take either view, and it- that's gonna depend on your circumstances. Are you determined to make that platform work?

Which, if you're willing to go into the videos and the entertainment, you can make it work. It's gonna take a lot of time and effort. Or move to a different platform which may suit you better. I chose to move to Substack because it's a writing platform.

The only videos I record are the podcast, which goes onto YouTube, and I make videos for my pattern business, but you generally only see my hands. You don't really see my face. These type of videos, they're not made for social media platforms. They're not entertaining enough, and I'd have to load the videos directly onto the platform.

They don't want links on there. They don't want links that send you to somebody else to get the traffic. So you do get punished for having links in your platform. A fly in the way.

Um, it's that season where flies are buzzing around everywhere. But yeah, social media platforms don't like it when you put links in posts because it sends you away to a different platform. They want you to stay on theirs. So linking a video into your post doesn't work.

It punishes you, which means you've gotta load it direct onto the platform, which means if you're trying to build your audience on YouTube, doesn't work. If you're trying to, um, use different content but link it all your platforms together to save you time, doesn't work. And of course, these videos, they fade into obscurity after a few days because the social media feed moves so fast. So you have to load videos direct to the platforms, which then just takes time with the loading and figuring out how it all works.

That's not something I'm prepared to do. It's not content... The content I make doesn't work for Facebook, um, entertainment or Instagram entertainment. I prefer to...

I prefer to have written posts. If I'm doing... On a social media platform or on a platform in general, I prefer posts where I can write. So Substack, I can write.

I don't m- do videos over there. I don't post any of these videos on there. I don't post any of my, um, crochet business f- for, um, Froggity Frog over there. I just write, and that's what the platform was made for.

So that suits me. I'm starting all over again there. My subscribers are growing slowly but surely. So if you join Substack, then anyone that you follow, you become a subscriber for, and that platform is, can be done for free.

So my daily posts for Crochet Business School over on Substack are free. I have a paid tier, which is actually a membership, which no one is obligated to join whatsoever. But you can follow me for free for daily tips. I'm posting twice a day.

I'm posting a longer article every week that links to the podcast, and that's at crochetbusinessschool.substack.com. But many people haven't used Substack before, and that's just fine.

I'm still gonna be here every week. I still send out my newsletter every week. There are multiple ways for people to find me. But if you are not in that position, you've got a hard choice to make.

Social media is really, really hard for businesses right now, and it's not looking like it's gonna change anytime soon. So the decision is yours. Do you stay and try and try and try to make it work, or do you cut your losses and look elsewhere? It's a difficult decision to make, and it's not an easy one.

But you have to decide based on what works for your business, and you treat it as a business strategy and not an emotional one where you stay tied to all the work you've put in before. So I would love to hear what your thoughts on that are. If you're staying, are you going? If you're on YouTube, let me know in the comments.

So thank you for watching, and if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so that you hear from me every week, you can do that at crochetbusinessschool.com/subscribe. The link is also in the show notes. Thank you for watching, and I shall see you next time for the next episode.

Bye for now.