A Picture is Worth 280 Characters
Social media has become the great equalizer of our day. Facebook allows families who live thousands of miles apart from each other to communicate regularly with great ease. Twitter allows those who have been disenfranchised to have a voice and to speak their mind. Instagram allows people to show off their best life to an adoring public, and Tik Tok allows regular, everyday people to fulfill their dreams of stardom. But where does it rank for artists whose trade is more literal, like painters, sculptors, and jewelers? The people trying to make a living through their art?
Social media is there for them, too, but they have to work at it a little harder. Artists can use social media to post their work, which in turn helps them to cultivate their audience. They can then refer that audience to their online storefront, like Etsy, Storenvy, or Gumroad. Getting people to the website is as easy as posting links, but how does one cultivate the audience? Therein lies the conundrum.
What many users overlook is that not all social media platforms are the same, even though many offer similar features and even usurp the most popular feature from other platforms into themselves. As a result, artists must know the best way to utilize each platform for best results.
Most Twitter users are on the platform for conversation. While in some cases that breaks down to partisan insults, artists on Twitter can use that instant communication feature as a way to gauge their audience’s interests. They can ask questions and post polls, which are helpful in determining a piece of art to work on.
According to SocialMediaToday.com, tweets with images get three times the amount of engagement as tweets with just text.
Engagement can mean anything from liking, retweeting, replying to, or clicking on a link in the tweet. This is great news for creatives! By sharing the art, potential customers and fans are more likely to interact, which by virtue of Twitter’s algorithm, means it will be seen by others.
One Twitter user, Jennifer L. Meyer, used the platform to great effect, amassing over 16 thousand followers in her time on the site. Meyers shared a mixture of images like works in progress, completed works, and even snapshots from her personal life. She also engages with other users and posts encouraging things to other artists on the platform, allowing her personality to drive more people to her page.
https://twitter.com/JenniferLMeyer/status/1389661416387399681
Tik Tok
Tik Tok is a video-based social media that allows people to be outgoing and boisterous for the camera. However, these aren’t traits many artists exemplify, so how do they stand out on the app? One way is to share Work-In-Process videos, showing step by step of the artwork from beginning to end. When these videos are well edited and set to the right soundtrack, they can be highly entertaining and draw a crowd easily.
This is how user Dan Bullock uses Tik Tok. He features time-lapse creating videos of his stunning paintings set to a popular song. The effect is stunning as, over the course of seconds, he transforms his thick swathes of paint on canvas into beautiful paintings.
Instagram is sort of a hybrid between Twitter and Tik Tok. Its main function is all about images; a user’s timeline will display all of the images they’ve posted throughout the years. Users also have access to “Stories,” which is shared content that lasts only for 24 hours. These can be videos, images, or reshares from another account.
But Instagram also has a feature called “Reels” which it launched to compete with Tik Tok. Reels allows users to post short videos of themselves doing whatever (within their TOS, of course), whether it’s making art, lip syncing to a pop song, or just acting out a funny skit.
So in some ways, Instagram is an easier platform to perform on as it’s the perfect balance between pictures and video, which means those wishing to build an audience can recycle some of the content they’ve created on the other platforms. However, those creators may wish to create some unique content for Instagram. These can be behind the scenes images of the art creation process or a look into the artist’s life through their limited-time Stories. It’s always ideal to give the audience a reason to visit that social media stream, and if it’s nothing but recycled content from the other platforms, they can just go elsewhere.
A great example of an Instagram user is Joel Furtado. His distinctive style makes him stand out among other artists on the platform, garnering him almost 30 thousand followers. He posts a mixture of in-progress shots, finished work, and even some posts from his personal life, but he also utilizes Stories to capture that audience as well. He also regularly reminds his audience that he sells prints of his work, knowing full well that he has to market in order to make money.
One downfall of Instagram, though, is that it doesn’t allow live links in the captions under images like Twitter does. So when sharing a picture of a work that is available for sale, the artist can’t just drop a link to their store. That link will just appear as text, forcing the user to copy and paste it into their browser, which is a hurdle that only the most hardcore will care to overcome. To circumvent this, creators can use sites like LinkTree or Lnk.Bio to list all of their appropriate links in the one link section of their bio. LinkTree and Lnk.Bio are very user friendly and both offer limited free service, but the paid version for both unlock tons of features, including the ability to brand the landing page.
Our modern world allows creatives the freedom to make art and to interact with like-minded individuals. However, the “hustle and grind” culture that we are currently in requires those same creatives to market themselves and their work properly if they wish to make a living from their art. And though social media makes that easy to do, it’s just as easy to fumble on the one-yard line, mere feet away from closing that sale. By learning the “right” way to utilize social media, creatives have a much better success at completing that touchdown.