by Frank Hamilton, Guest Blogger - Over the years, the popularity of social media has skyrocketed, and the influence it has on shaping perceptions and habits can no longer be denied.
Social media marketing for artists has become an essential aspect of their online marketing strategy, which they use to reach a wider audience and generate more sales.
In this article, we will be showing you how to write social media posts that will help sell your art.
1. Use The 3 W’s In Drafting Your Post
You have probably heard that content is king, but content without a substantial purpose is just a waste of time. To create excellent content, you must first ask the following questions:
These questions are called the three W’s. Your social posts should have a clear objective, and that objective should be clearly stated. This is because when your intended audience sees the content, it has to be something they will find beneficial.
2. Apply the KISS Principle
Another tip on how to use social media to sell art is to use the KISS principle. KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Keeping it simple is not all about the post being short. While you may hear people say that the shorter the content, the better, a recent BBC Study debunked this claim as a myth. Instead, we advise that you keep your social post simple to understand.
3. Tell A Story With Your Post
Storytelling is a very effective social media marketing tool for promoting artists and their work. Creating social posts that tell stories is a fun and engaging way to sell artwork. Studies show that storytelling as a marketing tool can boost your post-conversion rate.
Here are some tips in using storytelling in social media marketing for artists:
4. Use Words that Evoke Emotions in Your Potential Buyers
The best salesmen know that making sales is not only about selling a product; it is about selling a feeling/emotion. This knowledge is even more critical in sales of art. Therefore, when creating social posts to sell your art, infuse strong emotional words in your copy that will resonate with your target buyer.
5. Understand The Difference Between "Active" and "Passive" Voice
In thinking of how to use social media to sell art, you need to think of engagement and nothing is more engaging than using active voice in your social posts. For example, use “Tom painted the entire portrait …” as opposed to “The entire portrait was painted by Tom”.
There are several advantages of using an active voice over a passive voice, and they include:
6. Always Use CTA
If you are new to social media marketing, CTA, which stands for Call To Action is an action trigger that you infuse into your post, which will ask, tell, and remind your readers to take a specific action. For example, for a post with the main focus of selling one of your artworks, your CTA could be “click the link in our bio to purchase this piece.’
7. Make Use Of Hashtags
Using hashtags ensures that your post gets a broader reach. This is vital because when you spend a lot of time creating a post, you want to ensure it reaches a broader audience. Therefore, using hashtags will help give you this result. Think of hashtags as keywords for social media. They help people searching for what you are offering to find you easily.
A few tips on using hashtags:
Conclusion
Implementing these few tips in your next social post should give you your desired result of reach, engagement, and sales conversion on your artwork. However, if you need assistance there are several websites such as Online Writers Rating, which provide custom writing services. These types of sites are perfect for finding professionals who have experience in writing social media posts that sell.
Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.
The following are some thoughts on what an artist can do to improve their chances of success in the coming New Year. Contained in these ideas are links to additional articles and posts which will explain and detail these concepts more fully for the reader;
1. Check all of the pages of your website to see if they working properly and loading quickly. If you can speed up the loading of your Home Page, this should be done. Besides being annoying to some viewers, slow loading speeds can negatively impact whether your website gets a higher page rank or not. Also, make sure that your website links (internal and external links) are working and that the format of each page is the way in which it was intended to be viewed (for whatever reason, things move, stop working, disappear, images and graphics can suddenly not be viewed).
2. Make sure that all of the images on your website are sized properly, with a low resolution (A Resolution of 72 will help your site to loader more quickly too) and the images should be color corrected as well.
Are there better images or graphics that can be substituted for what now exists on the website? . This should be done in order to get the search engines to index your images (Without image descriptions the images will not be indexed). By doing this, they will ultimately get your images to show up in the search results and when the images are viewed, they will also direct the viewer to your art website as well.
3. Review all written text and images within your art portfolio. Whatever parts of the portfolio can be improved upon should also be done. Are there any new images that you can display? Are there better images that can replace present ones in your portfolio? Try to upgrade and update wherever possible within your art portfolio. Make sure all have titles, sizes and pricing information.
4. Review and rewrite your Artist Statement and Biography. Update your CV adding any exhibitions, new publications and any other pertinent information that has taken place since the last time that it was posted on your website or printed in your portfolio.
5. Review any of your social media accounts, update or complete your profiles. If any of your social media profile images can be improved or upgraded, then they should be done and also add any other new information to those social media profiles as well. Just make sure that whatever is written or is shown on the profiles is spelled correctly and with proper sentence structure.
Remember, a social media profile is almost like having an online resume’ for the whole world to see. The idea of a Social Media Profile is to get people to want more information about you by going to your art website. This is accomplished with a completed, well written and attractive Social Media Profile.
Here are a few other ideas for an artist to try and to follow in the New Year; In order to drive more traffic to your website, an artist should consider starting an Art Blog for the New Year. An art blog helps to brand you as an expert, expands your target audience and ultimately will provide more visitors to your website.
Also, an artist should try to join and set up with as many Artist Registries and Directory Websites as possible in order to also create and direct additional traffic back to their art website.
There are many free Art Portfolio Websites where an artist can join and also expose their art to many more viewers. Whether it is an Artistry Registry, Directory or an Art Portfolio website, any of these platforms will help to direct traffic back to the artist’s website and should be freely employed by the artist.
An artist should start an ongoing online public relations campaign for all important art-related occasions, events, and functions that they are involved in throughout the year. Here is an article that we posted with some ideas to follow; Top 10 Events for Artists to Send Out Press Releases.
If the artist is totally happy with their marketing efforts and with the volume of sales of their art, then all of the suggestions above are totally unnecessary. However, if the artist is disappointed with their results, then we believe that some of these ideas may help the artist to be more successful in 2014.
Happy New Year to all art professionals from the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery
As an Artist are you unhappy with the results of your social media efforts? There could be a simple answer to this issue in that you may be posting your messages at the wrong time of day!
Over the past several years there have been several studies which have measured and quantified some of the best times and days to post social media messages in order to maximize the reach and effectiveness of a social media campaign. The following will outline some of these ideas and how you can increase your chances of being read and shared by more of your followers;
Facebook – The best time of day to post on Facebook is in the afternoon from 1:00 PM to 4:30 PM. Also, according to several studies they believed that a Wednesday is the best day of the week to post, as this day generates the maximum amount of traffic and your chances of being read by a greater amount of people increases on this day.
Twitter – On Twitter, the best time to post is also in the afternoon from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM on weekdays, rather than on weekend days.
Linkedin – Due to the nature of this social media platform, that being for working professionals, it indicates that from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM (before work) and late in the day 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM will be the best periods of the day to post your messages. People have the time to get caught up on their networks at these times.
Google Plus – Anytime from 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM is the greatest time to post on Google Plus in order to reach the maximum audience for your message.
Pinterest - There are some studies that will show that the afternoon is a good time to post on Pinterest, but the absolute best time of the day is to post between 7:00 PM to 12:00 Midnight. Also, weekends are the best days to post, as viewers have more time to devote to this platform then.
Remember: Pinterest users view this site in terms of a hobby and that is why nights and weekends create the maximum reach for any marketer.
As an aside, weekends are the best time to have your message shared by followers within your networks. The explanation for this is that people are more relaxed, they have the time to read your posts and the time along with the inclination to share that information with others who they feel would also be interested in that information.
In any social media strategy, stay on message with related content in your posts that your target audience will find interesting and helpful. Post messages and content on these days and times with your various networks and your social media promotions will become immediately more effective and successful. Good luck!
Every day I hear from artists who are unhappy with the volume of traffic that visits their website and of course, the disappointing amount of sales that they ultimately achieve. To me, besides paid advertising, the number one way to quickly increase traffic to an art website is to create and publish interesting content related to art. This form of marketing is called “Content Marketing” and it is used by all successful marketers in and out of the art business.
Content marketing is the creation and the publishing of pertinent and interesting content, which attracts a defined target audience. After finding and reading the article content, the reader will then take further action related to that content. Simply put, people are clamoring for good information that they find authoritative, interesting and informative on a given subject, in this case, art. How do they discover this information? A majority of people now research subjects online, by using search engines to find and discover materials, information and related content associated with their interests.
Therefore, a well-written article about an art-related subject, which employs a title, sub-title, and paragraphs with art related keywords can be found online, within 24 hours by the author’s target audience, when a search for that topic is used with those art related keywords.
It is a fairly simple process of writing and publishing the content online through an artist’s website or through their art blog. Additional means by which an artist can publish content is through press releases, document sites, article sites, social media outlets, art related community sites and art forums. When a search engine crawls a website, they now pick up and index a well written, keyword rich and relevant article within a few hours! From there, an artist can further promote and leverage that article through social media and with their social networks. The better and more informative the article, the more people will take the time to read and then subsequently share with others.
A well-written article will have a keyword rich title, as this is the main determination for people in finding that article. Also, the title has to be related to the content of the article. That is why the same and related keywords should also be used within the content of the article, as the search engines want to see that the title is also related to the content. To further this thought, any links within the article should also be strongly related to the subject matter, as this helps the search engines in grading its importance and subsequently, help in getting found too.
Overall, a keyword rich and informative article which is related to art or about an art niche can help to point visitors to your art website. When an artist creates informative content on a continual and consistent basis, they will be able to create interest and traffic to their website. If artists are unhappy with their art sales, they should employ article content as part of their overall marketing program.
