Why is social media important for artists?  

Social media is an important marketing channel for artists. It’s one of the best ways to get image heavy content out there for all of the world to admire at the click of a button.  

Social media is a massive network that consists of over 2.5 billion people*, all with different interests.

The trick to being successful on these platforms is being able to narrow down your audience and target the people that would be interested in your creations.  

We’ve created this social media guide for artists so that you can better understand how to use social media advantages to your benefit and create sales opportunities and brand awareness by doing so.  

“Take your time I spent around 3 months only working on one till I had a flow then I moved onto the next network. Don’t join them all at once as it will be overwhelming. Use buffer for scheduling. Pinterest can drive a lot of traffic and is worth looking at. Facebook is pay to play now and engagement and reach is very low.” – Patrick Redmond

The social media advantage for artists 

Social media has become an incredibly image heavy marketing channel and you can see why!

 Tweets with images are 34%* more likely to get retweeted that posts with no images, which is a massive difference in engagement compared to text only Tweeting.  

Alongside this, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business and that blogging is the second most important*. 

Social media’s objective isn’t to just generate sales, it is to create a stronger brand image that can be recognized by the masses.

It is a very cost-effective way of promoting your artwork and largely a free promotion channel, which is exactly the type of marketing that artists need when they are first building their brand or are limited by restricted budgets.  

Although there are paid advertisement options available, if you engage with your audience correctly, you should still be able to drive some positive results and create more revenue opportunities for your business. 

Finding your audience on social media 

There are several ways that you can use social media to target people with user behaviors or characteristics that may make them more likely to purchase your artwork.

Some of these methods include engaging with groups, engaging with influences, targeting your post demographics and using hashtags. 

Social media post and page targeting 

Optimising a social media page is quite similar to how you optimise the pages on your artwork website. 

To make it as easy as possible for your audience to be able to find your page, you need to ensure that your brand in prominent in everything that you do and that the content of the page is targeted towards the words and phrases that your audience will be searching for.  

An example of keywords and phrases that you could include could include the following: 

• Your location 
• Your art specialty 
• Your brand 

Furthermore, a lot of social media platforms and management subscriptions now have targeting options that can help you to optimise your page so that it appears to your key customer demographics e.g. gender, age, job title, relationship status.  

Make sure that you specify your ideal audience with each page that you write and each post you create so that you can make sure that your messaging is going to the right people.  

Engaging with groups 

Groups can be a really useful way to access your ideal audience, as you can find pages that have already captured the people with your key demographics.

However, to be able to use these pages to your advantage, you need to be able to adapt your messaging so that you can conform with that group’s regulations.  

Most groups don’t allow businesses to just post advertisements for very long.

Group pages are often based on a group interest that can cover a wide scope of information.

This means that people engage with these pages to learn, not to buy, so you need to be a bit more tactful about how you capturing their attention.  

Try using humour, interesting blog posts and photos or videos that inform, entertain, inspire or enlighten instead of going for the straight sell! If the group find it interesting then they will like, share and engage with your message which will expand your reach and increase visitors on your own page or website.  

Engaging with influencers 

If you’re feeling brave and ready for the spotlight, you might want to try engaging with your favourite influencers via social media.

For example, you could ask a famous gallery or curator what they think of your latest work and offer to send them a copy. 

If they react to your post then you are effectively accessing their audience, and if they approve of your product, they are also endorsing it – which makes you look fantastic to your followers! 

Hashtags 

Social media followers of all shapes, sizes and interests follow the hashtags that interest them.

By marking your artwork posts with relevant and interesting hashtags, social media users that follow the same hashtags will be able to see your listing posted.

Your post should also appear when you search that particular hashtag in the navigation bar.  

#NaturalArt #LocalArt #Manchester #BeautifulView 

Furthermore, hashtags are a great way to gain engagement momentum from different events and trends.

You can get creative a make content that’s relevant to whichever event or hashtag you choose and post it specifically to promote your business.  

#ArtistExhibition #ArtFestival #CraftFayre #Gallery 

Top Platforms: Social Media for Artists 

The best social media platforms for artists to advertise their artwork tend to be the more image content focused sites.

Great examples of social media sites that can be used to promote artwork effectively because of this reason include: 

• Instagram: This platform has an astonishing one billion users who upload 95 million photos and videos per day!* * 
• Pinterest: Using Pinterest can make your business part of a network of more than 250 million users, who are sharing an amazing +175 billion pins!* 
• Twitter: Twitter has an amazing 320 million regular users* who send over 500 million tweets collectively every day.* 

You can use any of these social media sites to post pictures and videos of your latest creations alongside your targeted hashtags and trends so that you can drive engagement and increase your followers.  

We hope that this guide has helped you to understand a little bit more about how to be successful with promoting your artwork on social media. Good luck!