Social Media for Artists: Our Top Choices
Your website is your front door on the internet but when it comes to engaging fans, and promoting yourself and your creative abilities any additional presence on the web is helpful. This is why social media platforms are merging their way into the art world, helping creatives make their work more accessible to the public. Social media allows for a new means of connection between artists, and individuals who are also involved in the arts or who may have an interest in anything involving the creative mind by sharing work and engaging in conversation. These platforms create a new potential to reach the eyes of viewers who may have never visited an artist’s website but just happened to have that particular artist’s page pop up on their social media account because of a friend, similar interest, search or suggestion. With all the available social media platforms available for free and vying for you to join it becomes difficult to decide where to begin. The following 5 social media platforms are some of the best for artists to present and share their work to the public. We capped our list at 5, but there are of course many other platforms that could be included on this list that are just as successful, so your picks might be different.
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/
Instagram has the potential to be your own private art gallery right inside your pocket. More specifically, it is an amazing resource when it comes to finding out what artists are creating compelling work, and to keep track of what kinds of art these artists post in order to see how consistent and productive they are. Created for an on the move lifestyle similar to most other social media platforms, Instagram can be only run through your phone or tablet. This platform gives viewers the opportunity to see who you are as an artist through both images of your work in progress, completed work, as well as videos of you actually creating. Letting people in on what you do and how you do it is a huge part about gaining followers and admirers of your work. Like any social media platform posting everyday is highly recommended. Being a visual focused platform, Instagram takes away from the need of lengthy verbal explanations. Which is often times favorable by both the artist as well as the viewer. It is also favorable over some platforms because viewers have the ability to see a lot of art at once without have to scroll through non art related news stories, posts, random videos, and advertisements.
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/
Very similar to Instagram, Pinterest is mostly visual in nature. However, Pinterest is more of a personal bulletin board where you create an online collage of categorized items. This means that artists have the capability to post their artwork in a categorized manner, as well as post images to a specific bulletin board regarding events that they will attend or have artwork displayed in. This allows for a vast amount of information to be sent out into the online world for anyone to feast their eyes upon. Through the use of tags on specific posts as well as repinning, so many people will come across your artwork and be able to share it with others. When you tag an image upload, individuals are able to use a search bar in order to find specific things, so any image you tag with art will most likely show up on one of the many pages of images pertaining to art. It is important to stay active on both your own profile as well as others profiles can greatly increase the amount of people who see that your profile is out there and ready to view. This also goes for other social media platforms as well, the more active you are, the more people will see your artwork profile and follow you.
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/
Facebook is a great platform for almost anyone to get their message across and known, so how can it be used for artists in particular? Facebook allows artists to showcase themselves through images, posts, videos, as well as giving them the ability to create events that they can make public or private and can invite anyone within the Facebook system to. The ability to create these events makes Facebook much different from the other social media platforms because it allows for direct personal interaction with your followers. Within the platform there is also the ability to create albums of work to showcase what you do. These albums can be classified through image titling. This same classification aspect is applied when it comes to naming the created page as well. When naming the page it is important to consider a proper name so when people search for you they do not have to dig too deep into the platform to gain access to your page. Unlike the other sites, only people who search for your specific page will come across it. However, you do have the capability to invite people and their friends to like your page, and then their friends may happen to see it and be interested in checking you out depending on how you displayed yourself.
Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/
Moving into a more blog like forum avenue of social media platforms, Tumblr is a place to tell a story, rather than just show your work. Although this site, like the ones above, offers posting features with an emphasis on visuals, it is known that the most successful artists on this platforms are the ones who tell a story or have something interesting or unique to share. It is often thought that you need a specific style of art to be considered a Tumblr artist, but Tumblr’s connection with the fashion and design world leads to many artists using it as a resource to both share and create connections.
Twitter https://twitter.com/
Promoting yourself is huge when it comes to the art world. Individuals will often never find you on their own, which means it is up to you to get your name out to them. 310 million people use Twitter on a monthly basis which means it is the perfect place to send out a quick 140 character or less tweet about a showing that you may have coming up or a link to a different blog or website you might have. You also have to capability to follow and retweet what others say. It also has the potential to be linked to your already existing website or blog where individuals can share articles or images that you post right from your site to their twitter.
Conclusion
It is important to remember to not expect to gain thousands of fans right off the top. As with everything else in life, practice makes perfect and experimentation is a big part of gaining a large following. So don’t be afraid to make multiple social media accounts and see which one works best for you and what you have to offer. Each of these accounts can be linked into one another creating for a great resource to have your name in multiple areas of the internet without having to update each one. It is also important to create a clear and concise username on any platform that will both make you known as well as easily searched and matches any of your other accounts, websites, or blogs, in order to keep your brand the same.
Sources:
https://www.lightspacetime.com/newsletter/pinterest-a-new-way-for-artists-to-market-their-art/
http://www.artbusiness.com/artists-how-to-use-post-sell-art-on-instagram.html
http://www.artbusiness.com/facebook-tips-help-protocol-etiquette-and-instructions-for-artists.html
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