Social media has revolutionized the lives of many small business owners and independent creatives around the world.

Using social media to share your products and services, build an audience, and authentically market yourself is a rewarding and worthwhile venture for anyone hoping to advance their craft.

While big businesses use paid advertising and marketing tools to dominate the e-commerce space, small businesses are also thriving by building an organic audience and using what free techniques are at their disposal. 

We’ll cover some of these here, and will hopefully give you some new ideas for how you and your business can evolve! 

How To Set Up Your Social Media Profiles For Success

Obviously the first step to marketing your artwork on social media is to have social media profiles where you can share your art.

There are various social media platforms that are recommended for sharing art, and we’ll go through each one here. 

You don’t have to be on all of them – it’s better to focus on a few and post a variety of regular, quality content, rather than spreading yourself thin and posting inconsistently across more platforms.

Have a read of what each platform has to offer, and you can choose what you think will work best for you.

Depending on the type of art you make and the type of content you’d like to share, you might find some platforms more appealing than others. 

No matter what platform you’re using, strategy is key.

Coming up with goals and a content plan and timeframes to complete these goals is essential in maintaining a good schedule and to be able to use analytics to figure out what is getting good results. 

Instagram

Instagram is a must-have for anyone trying to share their creative side. As the number one image-based social media platform in the world, it is a great platform for artists, photographers, and other creatives to share their art. 

The focus on visuals make it a great way to share a portfolio, and the mix of regular posts, carousels, reels, videos, and stories means that you can share a variety of content types in one place and use the relevant hashtags to build up an audience. 

To boost engagement on your Instagram profile, you should post on a regular schedule. Posting once or twice a day is an effective way to build your following, and mixing up the content type takes this even further. 

Now that Instagram has developed their reels feature to compete with TikTok, you can spend more time developing short videos that you can post on both platforms.

Taking advantage of content that can be used on multiple platforms is a great way to maximize your social media output while reducing your workload.

See: 5 Golden Rules for Building an Audience of Art Buyers on Instagram

TikTok 

The appeal of TikTok is the potential to go viral. By copying viral video formats and using popular audios, you can reach a massive audience that is outside of what you might usually target. 

TikTok has allowed countless small businesses to thrive, as people enjoy seeing authentic content that shows the time and care that goes into handmade products.

Sharing the real creative process can drive people to support genuine hard work and talent. 

With the amount of TikTok trends and the creativity of the platform, you will never be lost for new content ideas if you allow yourself to be inspired by others.

Facebook

Facebook can be a very useful platform for reaching specific communities through groups and posting on your own page.

As Facebook is a meta platform, you can link Instagram Business and Creator Profiles to a Facebook page and can simultaneously post the same content to both platforms at once.

This is a convenient way to reach another platform without having to dedicate time to an entirely new content format. 

Facebook has many arts and crafts groups, as well as local communities and groups made to share your small businesses.

By joining these and sharing your work and any links to items available for purchase, you can potentially attract new customers.

Depending on the type of art you create, Facebook has countless fan groups dedicated to artists, popular media, books, and more.

You can target a niche audience that have already gathered themselves into groups for you. 

Another benefit of Facebook is that there is more emphasis on the text aspect of posts, so you can share longer forms of written content.

Pinterest

Pinterest is another visual platform, where many creative people go to create mood boards and pin inspiration pictures onto boards to help them with their own creative endeavors. 

By getting your artwork into the mix and having people pin it, if you have provided details of who you are and links to your other social media or website, you can draw Pinterest users to your other accounts and boost your following. 

Tumblr 

Tumblr is by no means as popular as it used to be, but depending on the sort of art that you create, there could be a significant audience for you there.

Many creative people still use tumblr as it is so easy to reblog aesthetically pleasing images and have a blog that represents you, almost like a scrapbook. 

If your artwork is inspired by any literature, architecture, people, artists, media, or anything else you could possibly link it to, there will likely still be a fandom on tumblr that is passionate about the subject.

By sharing your art and getting into the tags, your work can quickly be spread around communities on the website.

YouTube

You can use YouTube to share timelapses of you creating your artwork, explaining the background of your pieces, and talking through your methods and the creative process.

If you want to create more detailed and long-form video content than what works on TikTok and Instagram, YouTube can be a great platform to do this on. 

You could treat it as a creative diary and document your journey as an artist.

You can easily share YouTube videos to Facebook and Tumblr, and you can link all of your other social media, website links, and affiliate links in the description of all of your videos.

Reddit

Reddit is a platform that is often overlooked, but it is hugely popular and has many thriving communities and surprising niches on it.

If you create a reddit profile, you can find specific subreddits where you can share your art, and even converse with other artists for inspiration. 

It’s a very quick and easy website to do once you get the hang of it, and the minimalistic nature of it means that you don’t have to invest much time into what you share on it – you can get away with sharing links to other social media posts or your website and summarizing this in writing. 

Final Thoughts

Social media is an invaluable tool that can take your art hobby or career to the next level.

You can find existing communities that you think you’ll fit into, or that will appreciate your work, and build your own community around your creations. 

“Marketing” can be an intimidating term, especially if you’re a naturally creative person.

But a lot of social media strategy will actually come naturally to you, and you might find content creation to be something that you enjoy.

Social media marketing is far more community and creativity based than traditional marketing and business strategies, so it is compatible with many creative individuals. (See: Learn What (and How) to Post on Facebook and Instagram)

We hope that our guide has given you some inspiration on your journey to success.