Scarcity and urgency leads to sales. You only have to look at things like Prime Hydration, which we wrote an article about, people fighting over toilet paper at the start of the pandemic, or Black Friday to see this happening.
Scarcity and urgency is all the more important when selling on social media, due to its transient nature. Most people don’t even go to your profile to look at your posts and reels. They just see whatever is served to them via the algorithm. And that’s almost 99% of people who see a reel or a post that’s just served by the algorithm. So if they click through to your site, you don’t have a second chance. You have got to make them do something, either buy the print or get them to sign up to your email newsletter so you can communicate with them in the future and then they can buy a print in the future.
They are the two objectives from this fleeting, transitory kind of social media traffic in order to make some permanence out of it. Either turn them into a collector or an email subscriber. An email subscriber is probably the most likely thing but in terms of making them into a collector or a buyer at that point, scarcity is essential.
So selling limited editions or not selling limited editions is a finer detail. The point you’re trying to make is to create scarcity so that somebody feels like if they don’t make a decision then and they come back a week later, they’re not going to have a chance to buy your print.
