How to establish your artist brand through social media

Dear Reader, if you chosen to pick this article up it means you have a problem and you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to deal with it. You’re an artist and you make art works but your artistic career seems to go nowhere. Your art works, wether its painting, photography, installations or sculptures are of a high quality, but they don’t reach beyond your circle of (artist) friends. You’re a bit surprise by this fact, you thought that ‘if I just make high quality art, the audience will automatically appear and my career will go forward’, little did you know that the quality of your art-works have little to do with your artistic success.

What you’ve failed to realize is, that the number one most important factor of any artistic career is your network. It’s your network that will give you exhibitions, invite you to talks, grant your subsidies applications, include your work in magazines and publications, give you gallery representation and enable you to sell your artworks.

Traditionally the networking practice is something which is rarely discussed among artists, and no art school or institution will teach you the ins and outs of growing a well functioning network. Before the social media internet revolution, an artist had to have a very active daily life, attend readings, workshops, visit exhibitions, mingle at openings, all the while trying to isolate the important key people within the network and establish a social connection. This has, however, changed dramatically with social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Now an artist like you can network from the comfort of your couch, no more awkward social situations, no more rushing around town trying to find the important people – now they are just one google search away.

This article is meant for you, to develop a set of strategies in how to grow your network and establish your personal artist brand by using the number one social media network, Facebook. An artist needs an audience to make art, to be able to transmit it to his network, otherwise it will largely go unnoticed. Facebook is the number one network and thus plays an equally important role in your artistic career as your work, so let’s focus our energy on a couple of strategies on how we can maximize our transmission success by using Facebook to craft our very own network of curators, artists and critics.

The number one most important strategy for extending your network, being included in shows, and getting a general positive response to what you’re doing is using Facebook as a tool to generate a buzz around your own personal brand, your artistic practice. Rather than networking offline at gallery spaces, Facebook offers you the possibility to network internationally within the reach of your fingertips.

1. Your Network

The first step is to isolate what network you want to be part of and included in and influence and be influenced by. Once you’ve circled the key-figures, friend-request them, with a little luck, they’ll accept and your on your way of creating an extended network of influential people. As the friend recommendation of Facebook will aid you, you only need to find between 5 – 10 key figures, and then rest will happen automagically by Facebook’s suggested friend recommendations. As a rule of thumb, if you have more then 5 – 10 friends in common, always add and always accept the incoming friend requests.

If the key figures are declining your friend requests, you need to create an awareness about you beforehand, this we can do by using the following steps.

2. Your Brand

Initially you are what you make, in the beginning when you don’t have a network it’s very hard to get the proper attention and responses to your work, since no one will be around to see or hear about it. A very common artistic problem. So how can you get the people you want to impress to care about your work?

One way is to make work that includes the people you want to influence, in a way to comment on internet culture, recent popular services or other work. If you don’t have the skills required to make something of your own, use a preexisting format, curate a BYOB or a Speedshow somewhere in your town and invite all the people you like to be part of your network. Once you’ve accomplished the event, it’s easy to add the participants as friends as they now both know who you are, and are grateful to be included in the show.

3. Events

Artists rely on offline events, such as exhibitions in galleries, workshops, parties. Once you’re part of the network, you will be invited to a lot of them. Join all of them. This is a way of showing your support and be part of the crowd. Wether you can make it or not doesn’t matter, as long as you’re on the participating list it’s all good. However, if you can make it, even better. Then make sure you’re part of at least a couple of pictures next to some of the people in your network. Once they’re uploaded, tag yourself and share them. This will future benefit the awareness of your brand.

4. Posts

Now this will require a bit more fine detail, what to post and when to post it. There’s a couple of different categories of posts and when they are suitable and not, so let’s have a closer look.

a. personal

Avoid complaining about personal things as it’s just dragging the network down, unless that’s your thing and you want to be known as the complainer. Focus on positive ‘lifestyle’ things, for example travel stories, high tech products you recently bought and party pictures are excellent personal posts.

b. interesting works

Sometimes you bump into something interesting, a nice article about art or a fantastic piece of art. If it has not been posted already by one or more people in the network, or if it’s not on one of the more common popular blogs, post it! If it’s on the more popular blogs, don’t post it. You don’t want to look old – if your friends would think “oh, he only found it now” it’s a sure sign that you should not post it.

c. your work

Your work is an important part of your posting. If you produce a lot of work, time the posts accordingly. You don’t want to post new work all the time, but keep it to once a month tops. Once you posted it, let it linger a bit in your feed, so don’t go and post something straight after to take focus away from your work. You want maximum reach with your work-posts. If the work has bright colours, or a concept which is slightly ironic and easily understandable the chances for success are high.

5. Comments

When should you comment on a post of someone in your network? Pretty much all the time, the more clever things you say, the more people will start noticing you. Please be aware though to not overdo it, it’s easy to become spammy, and no one likes a spammer, really. No one. Ideally you’re a half witty person, and can make some quick funny comments to the posts in your newsfeed. This will further benefit your Edgerank, as the people on who’s posts you comment will show up more frequently in your news feed, strengthening the feeling of belonging and working within a group of likeminded peers. By the way, make sure you like most posts too, an easy effortless, one could argue meaningless, way of showing support.

6. Groups.

There’s a lot of artists groups, a collection of people surrounding a certain topic. A couple of examples of groups are “✦ℙ☯ST IℕTERℕET✦”, “#Screenshots”. Join them if you can, if they are on invite only, request one and hope for the best. Once you’re in, the same principle as before concerning posting rules with some slight alterations. For example, in the group “#Screenshots” the topic is screenshots, so don’t go posting lolcats there, but stay on topic.

7. Pages

Every notable institution, gallery, blog, website, record label, shop etc has their own Facebook Page which you can like, to subscribe to their feed, and have their page show up on your timeline. This is an excellent opportunity to curate your interests and your own style in accordance with your preferred network, remember the same feather flock together.

If you follow the strategies outlined in this article you will be on your way to establishing your artist brand in no time. Once you’re there you will reap the benefits. Next up in this article series we’ll be focusing on how to best use Twitter to establish your brand, and the third part will help you with creating your very own self-curated Tumblr blog.