How to best promote your art in social media?

Want to boost your sales and reach more potential clients? Take marketing into your own hands! Promote your work beyond friendmade®, through social media. To help you boost your online presence we created a list of tips for the most influential social platforms for visual artists. Follow these tips step by step or just pick your cherries. Anyway… Get crackin’! The more exposure the better!

1) Images! – Post high quality images. Lighting is key if you want to have a successful instagram profile. If you don’t have any professional photos of your artworks – don’t worry… we’re here to help you out. We provide the artwork photos we created for friendmade.fm so that you can use them for your own social media pages. You can download them…

2) Story telling – Write interesting captions. Try to tell your followers a little bit about your artwork. Tell them, where you found inspiration, how long it took you to complete the artwork and other background infos that could be interesting. Don’t just use instagram as a way to showcase your portfolio. Give your followers a little insight in your life as an artist.

3) Hashtags – Use hashtags! This is key if you want to be found by new people. Best is to use a mix of large hashtags (100k – 10 mio) and a few smaller ones (1k – 50k). The big ones are most likely to get you a few quick likes on your artworks, but the smaller ones are crucial if you really want to grow an organic following. It is easier to stand out of the crowd and reach people when your artwork doesn’t compete with millions of other images. If you don’t know what hashtags are fitting, you can use tools like this one (https://www.all-hashtag.com/hashtag-generator.php) to find popular or similar hashtags in your niche.

4) Tag your friends – Tag your other artist friends. Use #friendmade (+ make up your own personal hashtag by using your ‘name+made’) and follow the other friendmade® artists. Tag the artists that curated you or that you curated yourself with the ‘@ function’. Because social media is meant to be social. It’s about connecting people and building a network with like-minded individuals. If you tag other friendmade® artists your followers are going to notice them and might follow them as well just like the other way around

5) Location Tag – Use the location tag. This feature is a quick and easy way to gain even more exposure. Just tag the city you live in, where you have your studio or where you designed your artwork.

6) Instagram Stories – Use instagram stories as a way to give your followers a little insight in (?) your life. It is a great way to share pictures and videos, that don’t look professional enough to post them onto your normal feed, because the expectations are not as high. Therefore you can post more and always keep your followers updated, which creates a strong community.

7) ‘Link in Bio’ – Unfortunately Instagram doesn’t allow you to add clickable links into each post you post. Here the ‘Link in Bio’ comes in handy. Make sure to update the link in your Bio-description every once in a while to have it fit your posts. Are you posting about a certain artwork or print? Put a direct link to the product at friendmade.fm into your bio! The less clicks it takes to find your actual product, the higher the chance visitors will actually buy it.

1) Art = business – If you haven’t already: create an extra artist page that’s different from your personal facebook page. First of all, it looks more professional and secondly you have the option to use the facebook insights. With the help of these insights you can see gender, age and other helpful information about your audience and use that info to better target your postings. There is a facebook help page that tells you all about setting up your artist page [https://www.facebook.com/notes/artwebcom/how-to-create-an-artists-successful-facebook-page/471077225608/]

2) Let your images speak – Facebook posts consisting of text and an image tend to get much more interaction than posts that just contain pure text. That’s because they catch the attention of your followers way easier. Use that pattern to make them aware of your art.

3) Interact! – Interact with similar pages. Comment on posts from facebook pages in the art niche on a regular basis. If you appear on people’s radar often enough, they will check out your page eventually and are probably going to end up following you, if they like your artworks.
Participate in facebook groups. There you’ll find like-minded people who you can connect with. Also you can use these groups as a way to advertise your new artworks.

Pinterest:
1) Create a business profile. It comes with helpful insights that show you what your followers like. That way you can easily pin more of what they are interested in and keep them happy.

2) Pin your own artworks as well as images you find on pinterest. Mix it up, so that you don’t come off as a spammer who only wants to promote himself. Also it is a great way for people to discover you. If they search for an image that you so happened to pin on your board too, they are likely to find your board and with that your entire profile.

3) Pin a minimum of 10 pictures a day. The more, the better. The good thing is, that all this content doesn’t have to be your own, so it’s not as stressful as it sounds. Simply repin pictures every day to show that you are active on the platform and throw in your own content whenever you can.

4) Optimize the description. If you share your artworks on pinterest, make sure to write as many fitting keywords in the description of the image as possible. Pinterest is an image based search engine, so it is crucial to make your photos searchable. The best way to find relevant keywords is to start by searching for one keyword that fits your image. Then, pinterest will suggest you more familiar keywords which they display under the search bar. You can now pick out the fitting terms and add them to your image description.

5) Add links to your website or to your other social media accounts to draw an extra amount of traffic. If you put all essential information in the description, it is going to spread across pinterest when someone repins your image. That way, people will know, who created the artwork they are looking at and also where to find you.

6) Join group boards. These tend to already have a lot of followers which you can profit from. Also, their followers are probably going to be in the same niche as you, which means that they are most likely interested in your content and will follow you. You find some art related group boards you could join here. [https://www.pinterest.de/ArtPaintings2/]

General tips:
1) Connect all of your social media platforms to each other. Cross-promo will drive visitors from your Facebook page to your Instagram and the other way around. This way you will build a stronger network. Even if the new followers are people who already know you and your work, they will still positively impact the algorithm and attract new followers.

2) Interact with your followers. If they take the time to comment on your posts try to always comment back and occasionally visit the profile of a loyal follower and like some of their posts as well.

3) Try to post frequently. How often varies from platform to platform but you should try to at least share one new photo every single week (preferably even on the same day of the week, but that’s optional). If you don’t have any new material, try to post a thematic matching quote or a story to keep your followers interested.