How to Promote Your Art on Facebook
If you are an aspiring artist with a view to becoming professional, trying to get your work out into the public eye is vital and you need to be thinking about social networks. They have an enormous audience and it is easy to get your stuff in front of people who are interested in art. Here are some easy ways to grow your social accounts and get your art in front of an audience:
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Making New Friends
Facebook has the biggest user base of all the social networks and it is often the case that you can share things on there and many of your friends and relatives will like it and while this is great, what you really want is to get it in front of strangers.
It’s very simple to do this, you just need to make some new friends by adding people. You don’t want just anyone though, make sure you are adding people that have an interest in what you want to share by searching for the topic and then selecting “People”. You can now add the people and if they accept your friend request, your art will appear on their timeline every time you post it, if they like it may also appear on their friends’ timelines.
Artist Pages
There are pages specifically for artists on Facebook which allow you to promote yourself and your art to the community. Once you have logged in to Facebook, go to the sidebar and select “Create Page”. Then select the option “Artist, Band or Public figure”
You can create your profile, including writing a description. This is important as words used in this description are searchable using Facebook search so be sure to include all the types of art you create that you will be uploading to your page.
Some good advantages of setting up an artist page include; unlimited friends (you have a maximum of 5,000 friends on your profile page), you can use it as a professional portfolio, you can tag your artwork with a number of descriptive tags and artist pages are more likely to pop up in Google search results, meaning even more potential eyes on your art!
Groups
Groups really are the best way to build an audience which you can then promote your work to, it is a good idea to build these as a community for everyone to share their work and then you can also use it to share your work and direct people to your website, blog, Twitter account or Instagram account from the group bio and also from pinned posts (a post selected by you that is pinned to the top of the group).
The biggest rule when starting a Facebook group is; rather than making a group about your art or art business only, make it a community where everyone can share and interact.
Building Facebook Groups
I recently made a group for sharing artwork which has now grown to over 6k members and sends a regular stream of relevant traffic to my site.
Building an Audience
When you have your group set up the next step is to build the membership. Rather than just adding your friends and hoping it grows exponentially you can be proactive and make sure it grows.
A cool thing about Facebook groups is you can add anyone on your friends list into the group automatically and unless they are massively offended by it, they will stay in the group. Of course, we don’t just want a group full of friends who have no interest in art, so it is time to make some new friends!
First search for a relevant keyword on Facebook (e.g. “Fine Art”) then select the tab “People” now add any relevant people who have an interest in what you searched for.
Now go to your group and add these people straight in. You already know they have an interest in the subject of the group so they will stick around in almost all instances.
Another good tip is to share the best posts from your group into other groups that are related and have a large audience. This will create a link back to your group for all their members to see and if they are interested they will join your group.
Creating an Engaged Community
Encourage the group to share and make the top sharers in the group into group admins, they will already have a keen interest and will likely want to expand the group further.
Always try to get involved in group discussions and offer any advice as needed and try and start discussions in the group.
Promoting Your Own Art
Once you have built an engaged community you can use it to promote your art, blog or website. When you share something the entire group will be notified and you can also pin posts to the top of the group for serious engagement.