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Elevate Your Art on Socials - How to Use Social Media to Complement Your Artist Portfolio

One of the most frustrating parts of being a creative or artist has been the realization that the ability to monetize your art doesn’t simply rely on the quality of your work.

In fact, your growth as an artist requires you to embrace a certain level of entrepreneurship, which can be difficult considering that’s not exactly what you signed up for. There’s learning to manage your finances, setting yourself up as a business entity, developing a brand, promoting yourself on social media, finding and fielding opportunities for partnerships and curation… the list goes on.

All this makes being an artist, while rewarding, also exhausting right out of the gate.

And as frustrating as all that is, it sadly doesn’t change the reality that if no one knows about you, no one will buy your work.

Enter: Social Media.

It’s become clear that social media is the most cost-effective and accessible way for artists and creatives to amplify their work. Even if you haven’t trained formally to be a world-class social media marketer, you can still apply certain tips and tricks to elevate your visibility as an artist.

Here are 3 ways to easily leverage social media to complement your artistic portfolio:

1. Use promotional space on social media as a landing page

Many artists use Instagram as their main promotional platform as it’s largely a visual platform. That means that the platform itself is primed for visuals to be positioned intentionally in a few ways, including Highlights, Pinned Posts, and Link in Bio. Use these capabilities to relay important information to your visitors.

Pinned Posts

Use your three pinned posts to center posts that highlight your journey/background, tell curators/collaborators what your focuses are (e.g. galleries, speaker opportunities, etc.) and what you care about. Make it easy for folks to understand how you fit into their plans for curation, collaboration and more.

Your mind may tell you to lead with the art, but the rest of your feed should already be illustrating your work effectively enough. That leaves the top of your feed to communicate your most important information.

Link in Bio

Use your link in bio to allow easy communication directly with you or your management for opportunities. Many artists use this link to bring visitors to the homepage of their website. This doesn’t necessarily work best for links related to social media pages. Instead, look into a page that:

• Showcases a few of your art pieces

• Includes important links (recent features, accomplishments, etc.)

• Outlines ways folks can pay you (do you take speaker opportunities, commissioned work, private galleries, etc.)

• Highlights ways visitors can contact you

You can link your full website to this page but ultimately, the goal is for your link in bio to communicate quick ways a visitor can work with you without having to search a full site to do so.

Highlights

Lastly, ‘highlights’ at the top of the page should be used to show social proof of your work, accomplishments, and connections quickly and effectively.

Use this to showcase galleries you’ve been in, events you’ve attended, people you’ve met and more. This will allow visitors to understand your role in the art and creative world, and also build trust immediately.

2. Focus on where you engage on social media more than how often you post

Creating content consistently can be a huge challenge for the growing creative. Posting creates an unnecessary focus on vanity metrics like followers, and can be stressful if you aren’t showing up as often as you’d like. It can even be especially overwhelming if you are still developing your skills in editing videos or writing captions.

Instead, focus on engaging with the people you want to get eyes on your artwork. Follow strategic accounts on Instagram of curators, art enthusiasts, other artists, and creatives. Like, comment, follow, and grow your followers and community by simply being a part of where the magic happens.

This won’t completely dissolve your need for posting, but it will ensure you remain visible in between posts, while keeping you abreast of important conversations and opportunities for elevation.

3. Make use of AI to create your content

As artists and creatives, we often take tons of behind the scenes and background pictures and clips of our work in progress.

Instead of spending hours trying to figure out editing and which parts of your video will generate the most views, repurpose old content by letting AI do the hard work for you!

Here are a few suggestions:

• Lately - Lately is an AI-powered content repurposing tool that can generate social media posts from blog posts, videos, and other long-form content.

• Murf - Murf is an AI voice generation platform that lets you create human-like voiceovers for your videos.

• Opus Clip - Opus Clip is a generative AI video tool that repurposes long videos into shorts in one click.

Closing Thoughts

Social media doesn’t have to be a burden on your creative capabilities. Instead, it can be a big part of your growth as a creative. Use these tips to lighten your load and continue to accelerate your visibility from Web3 and beyond.

Want to continue this discussion? Tameka posts things like this daily on LinkedIn. Follow her there where she talk all things creator economy, personal branding, and making the most of social media.

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• NFT Now is exhibiting leading Korean creators at its upcoming event during Korea Blockchain Week. Read the interview with Grant Yun, DeeKay, and Krista Krim here.

Artist Grants and Opportunities

• 🇵🇭 Submit your red, yellow, and blue art! We are teaming up with Philippines Blockchain Week to curate red, yellow, and blue art in honor of the national flag of the Philippines. Learn more and submit here.

• 🌟 Be a part of Randi Zuckerberg’s Tezos collection! Did you hear? Our Mother Hugger has just joined the Tezos community! Submit your artwork to be a part of her collection here.

• 💰 HUG is offering $500 USD grants to two artists each month in exchange for unminted artwork to raffle off to our community. Learn more and meet all our HUG Visionaries here.

This Week’s Art Drops

Did you know that these are just 8 of 300+ art drops on HUG? Get a full list of this week’s art drops from HUG here.