Introduction
Blink Tees is a small screen printing company known for their t-shirts, which feature both custom original designs and designs created for local businesses, schools, and organizations. While the company does have a social media presence, it is limited to only Instagram and Facebook, where they have a small following. Blink Tees uses these two platforms to showcase their products and highlight their partnerships with local businesses and organizations.
Platform Analysis
This chart illustrates the current social presence of Blink Tees. As of May 15, 2020, Blink Tees has 783 followers on Instagram and 535 likes on Facebook.
While these two platforms are well suited to the target audience, Blink Tees uses both of them inconsistently. Posts are spaced out over days or weeks, with large gaps between post time and a fairly low number of posts overall. On Instagram, Blink Tees averages 2 posts per week, while posting approximately 4-5 times a week on Facebook. The content of the posts are widely varied, including sharing posts from customers showing their t-shirts, sharing information about company activities, and occasionally showcasing products.
Competitor Analysis
Two of Blink Tees’ key competitors are CustomInk and Rotowear, both well known companies who are also known for their t-shirts. While CustomInk and Rotowear are both national companies, there are very few local competitors to discuss here. Local businesses are often in competition with national companies, and this is the case here.
Rotowear heavily focuses their social media efforts on Instagram and Twitter. While they do have a Facebook page, they only post there every 4-6 days. One major strength of Rotowear’s social media strategy is their focus on capitalizing on social media trends. They often quickly produce shirts with text from viral comments by athletes or famous lines from movies or TV shows, and then highlight these designs while the topic is trending on Twitter. For example, when baseball player Max Muncy hit a home run and then told pitcher Madison Bumgarner to “Go get it out of the ocean,” Rotowear quickly posted a t-shirt with that design on Twitter. The tweet quickly went viral.
CustomInk uses multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but usually posts the exact same content on each platform. Since CustomInk is focused on producing custom t-shirts rather than their own designs, they use their social media to highlight the products they have produced for their customers. For example, here is a tweet they posted showcasing hoodies they created for a Milwaukee Brewers player.
Audience/Publics Analysis
Blink Tees’ audience is highly localized. Many of their followers are local businesses or organizations, or employees of those customers who may have received Blink Tees shirts. The average follower seems to be middle-aged and someone who focuses on buying local and/or supporting local businesses. There is significant potential for Blink Tees to expand their audience to capture younger customers and average customers, rather than just focusing on business owners. Blink Tees also can maximize effectiveness by adapting content to each platform and using a customized strategy to reach different audiences with different platforms.
Content Strategy Analysis
Blink Tees uses several keywords consistently in many of their social posts: local businesses, partnering, limited edition, and custom design. These keywords reflect the overall focus of Blink Tees as a local company that works to partner with local businesses to produce quality products for local customers. Posts that showcase products or designs of t-shirts Blink Tees has created are consistently the most successful and receive the most engagements, but for some reason these types of posts are rarely used.
Conclusion
Blink Tees is a well established local business with great potential to reach new customers and create lasting fans on social media. However, the inconsistency in both post content and frequency weakens the overall effort to connect with followers on social media. The good news is that Blink Tees can capitalize on their catalog of already created designs and their existing relationships with local businesses and organizations to increase the effectiveness of their social media efforts. However, Blink Tees does face significant challenges from more national companies like Rotowear and CustomInk. If Blink Tees does not begin to use social media in a more effective manner soon, they could lose their opportunity to build a substantial following and create a community on social media.
