MosaicGlobe - Your free artist portfolio website, blog and art directory

Meet other artists, art lovers and art buyers. How Artists can use Social Media to sell artwork

What is Social Media?
Traditional media such as newspapers, television and many informative websites decide what content they are going to deliver and are generally considered one-way methods of content delivery. That is, the audience (us) are passive recipients of their content.

Social media on the other hand, is content created and shared by the community, for the community. This content invites the viewer to participate by simply commenting on the content or by becoming an active voice in the conversation by creating and sharing their own content.

Like MosaicGlobe, social media tools make content creation and sharing easy. As a MosaicGlobe member you are a content publisher in that you place content (text and images) online for others to consume. MosaicGlobe is considered to be a Content Management System and blogging platform with a user forum and tagged content. Other Social Media tools include additional participatory community experiences such as friending/following other members.

Why use Social Media?
Like any marketing initiative, Social Media marketing takes some time and effort to execute. In fact, it will most likely take more time than other marketing methods. But, unlike other marketing options, social media accounts tend to be free (or close to it) and simple to ramp up.

As an artist, I have used MosaicGlobe to make my content available - but I still want to reach a wider audience. Using other Social Media tools in tandem is a great way to increase visibility and engage a targeted audience.

There are hundreds of sites available to help you market your work so we won't try to cover them all in detail in this article. We will however, explore which social media tools are suitable for self-promotion and how to establish yourself, build a fanbase and increase traffic to your site.

Define Your Objectives
According to wikipedia "Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use."

Networking is at the heart of every business and make no mistake - if you want to spend time in the studio you'll need to sell some art to someone.

If you have ever been in a gallery, or attended a festival, where your art was being shown you have probably had the pleasure of chatting with your peers, art lovers and avid collectors. Building these personal relationships are key to your career advancement and art sales. You'll find that having a chance to meet and speak with the artist is a great way to turn an admirer into a collector - particularly when the item being sold has a couple of zeros.

Also, while attending your showing you no doubt had a signup sheet to collect the contact information of interested visitors. You do that, right? You at least gave them a card with your contact information (and your MosaicGlobe website URL) on it? It's always a great surprise when someone calls to ask if that piece they saw 3 months ago is still available.

Well, that's networking. Meeting people who you may one day have an opportunity to show with, or sell artwork to.

Now we want to do this online.

Social Networking
All forms of Social media can be considered networking in that you have the ability to meet and communicate with your target audience. However, some websites provide better tools than others to find the right group and share your information.

The big boy of social networking today is Facebook and it can be a great way for an artist to stay in touch with a group. Want an example? A friend of mine started a facebook project called "I'll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held" where he attempted to paint portraits of his followers. He was soon swamped with over 5000 fans requesting their portrait and has attracted tons of media interest.

Granted, not every artist on Facebook is going to have that response but it is a good example of how the application can be a valuable tool for finding and keeping in touch with your fanbase. Our own Facebook page (visit us on Facebook) has been a great place to communicate with members that may not check in to their sites too often, or have opted out of our newsletters. Our Facebook member's can upload artwork and share their MosaicGlobe sites with each other and their friends. Which in turn gives us another opportunity to introduce MosaicGlobe to a new audience.

Other great sites for networking include MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo and Orkut.

Media Sharing
A quick search on YouTube for MosaicGlobe reveals how some artists have created video content to promote their artwork and drive traffic to their website. Check out these great videos by MosaicGlobe members Andrew Boyce and Szabo Klara Petra. Other great video sharing sites include Vimeo, Yahoo Video and Viddler

For photo sharing Flickr was once the hottest thing on the web and remains a great resource for sharing your images along with SmugMug, Picasa and Photobucket

Blogging
Maintaining a blog requires some level of commitment and marketing acumen. Commitment to post regularly, and marketing to get visitors to the site (great content will keep them coming back). Search engines love well maintained blogs and your posts can help drive solid organic traffic to your site (A well maintained blog is updated at least several times a week, if not daily with relevant content and great links - inbound and out).

MosaicGlobe has a blogging pagetype built in. But you may want to consider keeping a separate blog to market all of your social media sites and to take advantage of any traffic assistance provided by the blogging network you use (and blog networks such as BlogCatalog).

 Hosted Blogging applications include Blogger, Wordpress and Vox

Microblogging is a media darling right now - and Twitter is at the forefront. Twitter enables its users to send and read 140 character messages known as tweets. Tweets are posted online and in the 'timeline' of your followers. Want to see how it works? Join up and follow @mosaicglobe. As a follower you will receive our daily tweets and be able to communicate directly with us and your oen followers. We'll follow you back so let us all know when you've posted new artwork!

Other microblogging services are Tumblr, Plurk and Jaiku

Collaboration
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia where 100% of the content is written by it's readers. Know something about something? Post it to Wikipedia. However, be advised that blatant self-promotional content risks an editorial rewrite by another avid Wikipedia author. You may want to instead try Google's Knol where you can write an article on anything you feel you can offer expert advice on. Other users can comment but not collaborate.

Another popular collaborative project is social bookmarking. These applications allow users to store, organize and share webpage bookmarks using descriptive tags (keywords) rather than organizing via folders. Tags allow users to also find related websites posted by other users. So post your MosaicGlobe site with the right tags and interested web surfers can find it, visit the site and add it to their list of bookmarks. Popular bookmarking sites include Delicious, StumbleUpon and newcomer Twine.

Social event calendars allow you to find, share and promote events such as art openings, festivals, concerts, etc. Check out Eventful and Upcoming to post your shows.

Reviews
If you have ever bought a shirt that you loved, ate a meal you disliked or visited a gallery you adored (because your work was being shown), then you have probably taken the time to tell someone else about it. But why not share that review with the world?

There are plenty of review sites dedicated to products reviews and restaurants. But those won't serve our needs. For website reviews, stick to social bookmarking. However, if you looking to promote a gallery or studio try using Yelp.

Yelp started as a restaurant review application serving the Bay area but has since expanded nationwide and covers just about anything. For example, check out this review on a controversial Denver public art piece (My review is one of the 5 star ratings).

Art Specific Sites
Over the last few years there has been a tremendous number of sites created to promote visual artists. If you had the nothing but time you could create an account at every one of them, but your probably better off having a look at what they offer before creating an account. Whether the primary audience is other artists or potential buyers it's all about getting your name and work out to as wide an audience as possible, but don't try and manage too much. Save some time for the studio.

There a a number of micro-communities worth joining. These are social communities that are relevant to a niche market. It'll be much easier to be heard in a smaller, content relevant forum like WetCanvas than a larger news community like Digg.

Other Art specific sites offer a 1 page gallery with a profile to showcase your art. Some popular (and free) art portfolio sites include ArtistPortfolio, Myartspace, myartprofile, artist-listing, voodoochilli and 723.

Another style of portfolio/community sites allow you to create online portfolios with the ability to sell prints and share profits. Try Imagekind, Redbubble, DeviantArt, FineArtAmerica to sell framed prints.

If you want an online marketplace for selling original artwork try the very popular Etsy as well Artfire, Foundmyself and D'art. Note that additional listing/monthly charges may apply.

Making it all work
The most difficult part of marketing via social media is maintaining, and actively participating in, multiple networks. Posting to twitter, updating facebook and adding new artwork to six different portfolios can be very time intensive. You may want to start with one or two additional accounts to get a feel for it. You want to maximize exposure to your work but don't overextend yourself.

Keep in mind what your goal is.

Meeting people who you may one day have an opportunity to show with, or sell artwork to.

Key to networking is being chatty. It's important to interact with other members of the social network you're a member of. Post to the forums, follow/friend people, link and link back, comment on the work of other members and return compliments. Reach out to other users with advice and questions. The more you participate the more exposure you will receive.

Next, add links back to your MosaicGlobe website. In addition to driving traffic to your site, incoming links are also important to the search engines. For search engines like Google, ranking would seem to be a popularity contest of sorts*. The more pages that link to your site the more important your site must be. It's also not a bad idea to link all your site together. Make sure that twitter link is on your MosaicGlobe, Facebook and MySpace pages.

*See our article on Understanding the Search Engines for more details.

Now you can track your statistics** to see which of your social media sites art bringing users to your site. If a site is under-performing perhaps you can ratchet up the self-promotion or perhaps even close the site if it continues to do poorly over several months. This will free up your promotion time to concentrate on other social media avenues.

**See our article on Understanding Site Traffic Trends

Social Media marketing isn't difficult and doesn't require a specialized team. It's something everyone can participate in and unlike other forms of marketing it's inexpensive and easy to launch. It just takes time and the desire to communicate with others. The benefits are increased exposure to you and your work among your peers and potential buyers. Although it happens, selling artwork to a complete stranger through a website is rare. More often then not it occurs after a series of discussions about the work and the artist. Making yourself available to potential buyers will only help move that artwork into a new home.

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