Tips in Building Your Social Media Following in Your Art Business
Category : Arts
Having an online presence in social media is absolutely one of the most important marketing strategies to promote a brand nowadays. There is no need denying the fact that social media (coupled with online options) is the best place to market your products because it is where the most influential and exciting interactions happen. Every year, technology offers something that modifies social media and makes people even more connected to one another and to the things they love and are passionate about.
However, it is not easy to build influence in social media. All of these popular personalities that rose to being most followed in their respective platforms did not go through it overnight. And this is so true for artists – struggling or successful. Artists need to have a dedicated presence on social media so they could seek new ways to build an audience and look for new forms of engaging new clients. Myself, as both a business coach and artist, have two different presences. I have two separate websites and different business pages on social media – so that the waters are not muddied and my ‘audience’ is not confused.
Follow these tips in order for you to build your social media following
1. Find your community
It is not really important to have a profile on every single social network that is out there. Look for a few ones where you are frequent and comfortable. When you collect all social media platforms, chances are, you will be spreading yourself out so lightly and it becomes difficult to juggle them all. Prioritize the platforms that you love using and look for potential marketing strategies about them. Having fewer platforms mean you get the ample time to manage and update them. Remember the old adage ‘less is more’.
2. Amplify your posts with images
These days, photos really run the social media world. Pictures are amongst the most shared content. They offer engagement for an audience to particularly put interest in your posts. If you want your audience to read on your status or pay attention to your questions, add a simple image background. This will provide better results than posting text alone. In addition, upload your art directly to your social networks. Users aren’t fond of dealing with links that open up a new window. A direct image will likely to get liked and shared. You can adjust your image size to get the best of it. Certain social networks such as Facebook compress your art to a poorer recognition. However, you can follow some tutorials to make improvements on them. You can also adjust the image yourself first before letting the site do it. In this case, familiarise yourself with the allotted images of all the social networks you are using. Remember, you’re an artist, this is a great opportunity to showcase your work in both direct and subtle ways. Go for it!
3. Maximise the tagging function
Make sure to tag everything. Hashtags are like friends who introduce you to everyone else at the party. Create a form of description that is likely to be searched and clicked. Tag your works and photos with as many associating words as possible. Hashtags work by letting the search engine gather the images together and narrow down which ones are the perfect fit for the search results. This will lead to great increase of chances of new followers. Hashtags are definitely a new effective online marketing strategy. So take advantage of everything that you can learn about tagging your arts and ranking well online.
4. Compress your links
Long and messy links do not appear appealing to click. They can even distract the audience’s eyes from the real content of the post. Also, they are difficult to organise if you have multiple links to include in your posts. Shorten your long URLs using websites such as Bitly and Ow.ly. Also, you can post the link of the main website and not only the particular article. This way, your visitors will stay longer in your site as they search for that particular post.
5. Be consistent
It might be complicated and takes a lot of work but being consistent in the social media world helps a lot. Your thousands of followers will not matter if your updates happened a few months ago. Even if you have the best works of arts and the most significant posts, if you let them sit in your platforms without updates for a year, you will still be possibly forgotten. Become an inspiration for your audience by updating regularly. Some might even consider you as their source of strength and motivation, and without consistency, these people will get disappointed and be out of your league. If you are not keen on posting so many subjects in a day like selfies and other fad stuffs, try taking advantage of the work-in-progress posts. Instead of posting one finished item outright, create a cliffhanger. Post teasers of your masterpieces so your audience will have something to look forward from your profile. In addition, do not forget to interact with your audience. Answer their questions truthfully and develop a friendly and sincere approach when you do so.
6. Be entertaining (or educational) more than promotional
Even though the major intention of your social media platforms is to promote your brand and market your products, develop your profile in such a way that it is more entertaining rather than promotional. As a business coach, my strategy is often sharing education as well as being entertaining. Your audience will not engage in a profile that is filled with advertisements and salesy proposals. They would love to get inclined with something that will bring the fun and inspiration. It should be 80 percent entertaining and 20 percent promotional so that the fun and engaging content of your post can actually become your key to sell your art by means of creating goodwill towards your business. Remember that social media exactly works that way – social.
I hope these tips have been useful. Perhaps not entertaining, but educational. Make a spectacular day!
Yours in Art. Donna