Ravelry on Goji — planned channel

Ravelry is not available to connect yet. It is planned, with no committed date. It is also the most specialised channel on this list, so the most useful thing this page can do is help you decide whether to care.

What Ravelry is

Ravelry is the community for knitting, crochet and fibre crafts, and within that world it is not one option among several — it is where the audience is. It holds a vast database of patterns and yarns, project pages where members document what they are making, forums, and groups for designers, dyers and shops.

If you sell yarn, patterns, tools, dyes or fibre, your customers are there and are actively searching. If you do not, this channel has nothing to offer you, and that is worth saying plainly rather than listing it as a general opportunity.

What it will do when it ships

• Share new articles or patterns with the community, with their picture and a link.
• Carry titles and tags across, which is how anything is found on a site built around search.

The exact placement — a group, a designer page, or a shop's own space — will be settled when the work is done, because Ravelry's structure differs from an ordinary feed.

What is holding it up

Ravelry provides an interface for applications, and access is requested from a small team rather than granted automatically. Alongside that, this is a specialised channel serving one industry, so it sits behind the broadly useful ones in our queue. That is the honest reason rather than any technical difficulty.

What you can do now

1. Set up your designer or shop presence properly. On Ravelry this is the equivalent of a shopfront, and members look at it before they buy.
2. Get your pattern pages right. Clear photographs, accurate yardage, needle sizes and gauge. This community reads carefully and reviews honestly.
3. Join the relevant groups and read them. Ravelry has strong norms about promotion, and each group states its own. Posting into a group that forbids it is a fast way to be unwelcome.
4. Use tags deliberately on the articles you would want shared, since they carry over.

What to use meanwhile

Instagram and Pinterest reach much of the same audience today, and Instagram is available now through your Facebook Page. Fibre crafts are strongly visual, and good photography travels a long way on both. Ravelry's advantage is intent rather than reach — people arrive already looking for a pattern — which is worth waiting for but not worth pausing your other channels over.

How this community judges a business

Ravelry is unusually rigorous, and that cuts both ways. Members test patterns, compare gauge, photograph their finished work and say publicly what went wrong - so a pattern with an error is found quickly and discussed openly. The flip side is that a well-made pattern accumulates project pages, photographs and recommendations that keep selling it for years, with no advertising at all.

What that means for automation is simple enough: the channel can carry your announcement into the community, but it cannot make the underlying work good enough to survive the scrutiny. Businesses that get value here invest in the pattern first and the promotion second, which is the opposite order to most social channels.

Common questions

Is this useful if I do not sell yarn or patterns? Almost certainly not. Skip it.

Will forum replies reach my inbox? No. This will be a publishing channel.

Do groups allow promotion? It varies by group, and each states its own rules. Read them before posting anything automatically.

Will it post everything I publish? Publishing rules will let you send only the articles that suit the community — which on Ravelry matters more than on most channels.