MarchMeetTheMaker® (MMTM) is a 31-day social media challenge for creative businesses. This event runs throughout March every year and starts on Tuesday the 1st of March this year. It takes place primarily on Instagram which makes this a really interesting visual event during which makers, crafters, creators, and artists can share their work and themselves using visual storytelling in the form of daily social media posts.
The challenge was created in 2016 by Joanne Hawker as a way to get out of a creative rut on social media. She created MMTM to show the different aspects of her business and encouraged other creative, small business to join in. The challenge has really taken off, gaining over 761,000 posts on the hashtag in just 6 years!
The beauty of a challenge like this is how the creative community comes together to support each other and make new connections. It is also a great opportunity to share your small business story, grow your confidence, and help people with similar interests find and enjoy your work.
I have been thinking about participating in the March Meet The Maker challenge for a couple of years, but the timing was never right for me. Now that I have a bit more time and energy, it feels more like a chance to get creative and have fun. I also look forward to getting to know new people through the hashtag!
I will be focusing on my eco-friendly and vegan stationery shop Novel Notes, although I also do graphic design work that is a bit more confidential due to the nature of the work. I will still be sharing some aspects of that business though, so if you are interested, please do follow along!
There is a lot of preparation involved, as I want to make sure I have a rough plan of what to post each day. Luckily, Joanne releases prompts before the start of March so that creators know what to post, and others can know what to search for. Keep an eye out for the following hashtags alongside #MarchMeetTheMaker so that you can click through and see more of the type of content that interests you. These are the themes for each day of March:
1. You & your work
2. Brand values
3. Planning
4. 3 things...
5. Free day – makers can take a break from posting, or post anything they want!
6. Free day
7. Favourite
8. Best Decision
9. Hands at work
10. Storage
11. Seasonal
12. Free day
13. Free day
14. The numbers
15. Time
16. Goals
17. Sneak peek
18. Sell yourself
19. Free day
20. Free day
21. Materials
22. Mistake/lesson
23. Product range
24. Milestone
25. Workspace
26. Free day
27. Free day
28. Low stock
29. New vs old
30. Day in the life
31. Looking forward
My plan is to post a mixture of content including photos, edited images and graphics, maybe some short videos or gifs. We will see how it goes. I will try to get a few blog posts out as well – there are a couple of topics that I think might be interesting to expand on in text.
The difficulty is finding time alongside work, projects, and life to create content, write copy, prepare hashtags for social media and search engine optimisation for blog posts… It can be quite hard to post regularly, let alone every day, when you have a small business to run, and you have to wear all the hats. The way I make big projects like this a bit more manageable is by making a plan of what I want to post, and start to prepare what I can in advance. This will mean that not everything will be representative of that specific moment in time that the post was created. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to show things accurately when images are selected, edited and posted to social media! Hopefully, the descriptions and blog posts can add a bit more insight to things behind the scenes, if the images don’t provide the full picture.
Make sure to subscribe to the Novel Notes mailing list for notifications about blog posts. If you prefer to just see the pictures that I post, the main platform for that will be Instagram. However, I will also try to repost a lot of the content to other channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
I might post relevant highlights to my graphic design website www.alexmakes.co, and if you are on LinkedIn you might see those highlights there too.
Discovering my favourite creators is one of my favourite things about social media, and I imagine there will be lots of great content to check out from many incredible makers. Don’t forget to type in the hashtag #MarchMeetTheMaker or #MarchMeetTheMaker2022 to participate. Whether you are telling the story of your creative business or looking to learn more about the makers out there – I hope to see you online somewhere during the month of March!
