Social media. The term has become synonymous with marketing. It is supposed to unlock marketing opportunity and sales for artists. But, how? We’re sharing a few tips for leveraging your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Before we dive into each platform, here are a few general social media best practices:
- The 80/20 rule: People do not want to be barraged with sales messaging. Instead, dedicated 80% of your posts to entertaining your viewers and 20% promoting to them.
- strong>Content quality over quantity: Make sure your content is valuable to your readers and you’re not posting for posting’s sake. Connect with your customers in an authentic way.
- Brand consistency across platforms: Make it easy for consumers to recognize your business and brand by maintaining consistency in: your logo and tagline, imagery and your bio/artist statement and tone and voice of your content. Follow successful artists and pay attention to how they brand themselves.
- Dashboards save time: Download and use a social media dashboard like Tweetdeck or HootSuite to manage your social accounts.
- Track engagement: Stay tuned to what posts perform well so you can get an idea of best performing content and timing for your audience.
- Be consistent: Don’t come out of the gates sprinting. Only commit to a feasible amount of posting. You don’t want to set up unrealistic expectations with your followers.
- Images + Video: Studies show that posts with images generate more interaction than posts with just copy. That being said, Facebook now prioritizes video over images in the News Feed. Over 8 billion videos and 100 million hours are watched on Facebook every day.
- Engagement: Encourage engagement by asking a question in your post. And make sure to follow up with all comments! Engagement keeps readers coming back for more.
- Cadence: It’s recommended to post once a day.
- Timing And studies show that the best time to post on Facebook is between 1pm – 4pm. But remember, since that’s a popular time, there will be a lot of competition; consider testing posts at other times.
- Hashtags*: # is rarely used to find content so it’s encouraged to use them sparingly.
Inspiration: Here are 10 Artist Facebook pages for inspiration. You can also learn from other types of businesses here. And, Facebook provides artist profile advice.
- Post length: At the end of September Twitter changed the game. It doubled the character length allowed in posts, from 140 to 280 characters.
- Save characters by using a URL shortener like Bit.ly or TinyURL.
- Timing + Cadence: According to the research of an established entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss, the best time to Tweet is between 4:30 – 6:00pm ET. And he recommends posting about 6 times in that 1.5 hour window. The second most effective time is between 10:00am – 2:00pm ET.
- Artist, Lori McNee, recommends posting one personal tweet for every 10 information tweets.
- Re-tweet (RT): Re-tweet posts to get the attention of collectors, artists, organizations and others you’d like to follow you.
- Photos: Share a photo using Twitpic to share your complete or works in progress. It’s a great way to get your work out there and get feedback along the way.
- Hashtags: Use 1-2 appropriate hashtags to broaden your audience. Apparently using more than two hashtags lowers your engagement rate.
- Timing + Cadence: Post at least one photo a day. According to CoSchedule, the best times to post are between 2pm-3pm and 8pm-9pm.
- Consistency: Treat your account and the grid of images as a collection. Every photo should be cohesive. The easiest way to achieve this consistency is to choose a color scheme and stick with it. Some artists use only pastels or earth tones.
- Beyond the work: Share images of your studio, your progress and other imagery that portrays your brand and allows customers to develop an emotional connection.
- Blue and natural light: Blue-toned images perform 24% better than ones with red or oranges tones. Bright images get 24% more likes than their darker counterparts.
- Hashtags: Use hashtags to increase your followers. Here is a list of the top 100 hashtags. According to HootSuite, posts with 11+ hashtags see better engagement.
- Like & Follow, often: Like other people’s photos to generate more followers and likes for you. You can receive 6.1 more followers for every 100 random photos you like.
*Hashtag: Back up – what is a hashtag? A hashtag is a tag; anyone who clicks on a hashtag is taken to a stream of all posts with that same tag. According to ArtistsNetwork: “The right combination of hashtags helps expose you and your work to a larger but also targeted audience by making what you’re specifically offering easier to find.”
Written by Elysian Koglmeier
