Branding Your Creative Business: Social Media For Your Business
Faye Brown · Faye Brown Designs
A friendly, UK-based overview of six social platforms plus blogging and press, useful as orientation but too shallow for anyone past the basics.
Branding Your Creative Business: Social Media For Your Business is the fourth installment in Faye Brown's series on setting up a small creative business, and it reads exactly like a check-in point rather than a standalone course. Across ten short lessons and just over an hour, Brown walks through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, a handful of smaller platforms, blogging, press outreach, and finally time management. The pace is brisk, almost too brisk for some sections, but the overall arc makes sense: get set up on the major platforms, extend into secondary channels and content, then step back and figure out how to fit it all into a working week.
What actually gets taught
The strongest material sits in the Facebook and Twitter lessons. Brown gives exact cover photo and profile picture dimensions for each platform, which is a small but genuinely useful detail for anyone setting up business pages from scratch. She also brings in a guest voice, fellow shop owner Jen Whitman, who offers five specific tips for turning followers into buyers: keep introducing new product variations, surface reviews, keep branding visually consistent, be generous and social rather than purely promotional, and always be upfront about pricing. The Twitter lesson introduces the 80-20 principle, mostly interact and only occasionally sell, along with the idea of joining local hashtag hours, which Brown credits with landing her real client work.
The Pinterest and Instagram lessons are more anecdotal than instructional. Brown recounts a personal misstep, pinning a free template without first collecting email addresses, and turns it into a lesson about the value of list-building. That is a fair point, but it stands in for a section that could have offered a repeatable process rather than a single retrospective story. Instagram gets a tour of accounts worth studying and general advice about bio writing and hashtag research, but little in the way of a concrete system a beginner could copy.
Where it runs thin
The closing lessons on blogging, press, and scheduling are the weakest stretch. The blogging lesson mostly weighs the pros and cons of keeping a blog at all, and the press lesson, while it does offer a workable pitch structure of three publications at three different scales, spends more time on etiquette than on tactics. The scheduling lesson is barely more than an encouragement to plan a weekly template and take breaks.
Because the course was recorded when platforms looked different, several specifics, follower counts, feature names, and the description of Periscope as a promising new tool, have aged out of relevance. The underlying principles, consistency, genuine engagement over vanity metrics, and building an owned audience through email, still hold up.
This is a course built for someone standing at the very beginning of setting up a creative business, ideally someone who has already sat through the earlier parts of the series. Taken on its own, it functions more as a checklist and a pep talk than as a skills-building class, and viewers looking for hands-on tactics or platform-specific depth will find themselves wanting considerably more.
The standout
The 80-20 rule for Twitter, spend 80 percent of activity on genuine interaction and only 20 percent on selling, is a concrete ratio a beginner can apply immediately across any platform.
What you will learn
- Correct image and cover-photo dimensions for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram business pages
- How to grow a genuine Facebook following using the 80-20 style engagement approach and Jen Whitman's five tips
- How to use niche hashtags and local hour events on Twitter to build real relationships
- How to repurpose Pinterest content into infographics, lists, and tutorials that drive traffic back to a blog or shop
- How to pitch blogs and magazines for press coverage and build an email newsletter list
- How to build a simple weekly schedule that balances client work, marketing, and time off
Best for: A brand-new solo maker or Etsy-style seller who has already worked through the earlier parts of this branding series and needs a plain-language map of where to show up online.
Skip it if: Anyone who already runs active social accounts, wants current platform tactics, or needs help with paid ads, analytics tools, or algorithm specifics, since the advice stays general and dated in places.