Tuesday 24th September 2013
The power of social media is something that we've touched on briefly during our last few posts, but it's time to take a closer look at some of the ways it can benefit your art career the most. Having an active social media presence is no longer an option, either for successfully established artists or for newly-developing talents - but if you don't use it the right way, you may as well just be wasting your time.
One of the most important aspects to your social media efforts is to carefully target who you interact with. Actively seek out groups and pages that are dedicated to critiques, art-sharing and art collecting. Start posting in these groups, and make your posts informative and helpful - that way, when the time comes for you to share your own newest work, people will recognise your name and already have accepted you into the community.
The other crucial element is to create a Facebook page dedicated to your own work. Think of it as an extension of your Gallereo page, one that allows you to quickly and easily get in touch with your fans, letting you inform them of new work that you've posted, any new shows that you've got upcoming, and any sort of sales or promotions you want to offer on your work. Gallereo integrates easily with your social media page, making it even easier for you to share updates with your fans. This is where the real benefits from social media begin to affect the number of pieces you sell.
To make your page truly effective, however, you need to develop a fan base that truly admires and appreciates your work. These people will become your own personal "artwork evangelists" - they will share your work with their friends, who will hopefully share it with their friends, etc until you become an Internet phenomenon. As Kevin Kelly puts it, they're going to become your '1000 true fans'. His hypothesis is that once your community of 'artwork evangelists' reaches the 1000 mark, you'll really start seeing the benefits that social media sharing can offer you, and your career will start taking off. He was referring to a brand, of course, but when you're an artist, you - and your signature style - become your brand. To make sure you keep your fanbase actively interested, be sure to post other interesting things above and beyond your own artwork. This will ensure that your fans regularly come back to your page, which will make them more ready to appreciate and share your artwork when you add it into the mixture of posts you make. Try to post at least once every day to your page, but don't overdo it - people will pull away if they feel they are getting 'spammed' with posts from your page.
Optionally, you can also sign up for a Twitter account, and link it to your Facebook account to increase your pool of potential viewers for each new piece of work you post. Now that Twitter has begun to incorporate image-based tweets, it's a much more viable tool for artists than it originally was. Regardless of this, though, Facebook is still the undisputed champion for artists when it comes to useful social media.
Posted on September 24th 2013 on 01:41pm