Social media has become a great tool for artists and creatives of all kinds. Essential to showcase your work to a global audience, they create a community of enthusiasts and offer endless networking possibilities. However, emerging on these platforms is not easy and requires a well-defined strategy and a good dose of perseverance and knowledge.
For years now we have been hearing the same rules repeated to be able to reach a wider audience:
- choose a start name and a distinctive logo
- build visual and communicative consistency
- be constant as a presence on social media
- plan content
- research and recognize their niche
- add value to your content
- participate in events and collaborations to increase visibility
- listen to audience and customer feedback
- evaluate publication data and various post trends
- publish in the best time slot
- choose the most effective hashtags.
These are all really important topics that each of us should take care of in order to emerge.
But even by calculating all these factors well, what we publish on social media does not always receive an adequate resonance.
Sometimes we really work hard to create content and when this receives little visibility, the reaction is of frustration and discouragement.
And it's more than normal !!!
First of all we must remember that we are not machines but people and regardless of our commitment, there will always be something to improve.
Another thing to remember is that all our commitment is not defined by the result of a single content and that even that single content is actually very useful to us to ask ourselves: “Why did this content go wrong? Could I define communication better? Was this content unclear? Did I post in the wrong time slot? Did I use correct hashtags? Etc. etc..” and give us the opportunity to analyze all the factors that can contribute to its performance.
Analyzing the current situation we can say that certainly the social channels have allowed us over the years to reach an immediate way to a global audience and this has created an inevitable increase in the job opportunities of all and therefore also an increase and knowledge of countless “competitors”.
To date, accessing social media means having a search engine at your fingertips and a global view of all the people who also realize jobs similar to us.
So how can you stand out with your own product compared to others?
The visual part is key and is our starting point.
What we propose and how we propose it is our first impact and business card with our potential followers and supporters.
But this is not always enough: in fact the real challenge is to give tangible value and authenticity to our proposals.
Making a visually beautiful content or product will definitely enchant some looks, but how many people will be pushed to really support us?
How do I create a valuable product? This is a complex search, but nothing impossible. And we should first ask ourselves 'who better than us can value what we are doing?'
Our starting point is us. Each of us has our own history, our own training acquired over the years that allows us to develop a unique path and a unique result.
How do I create an authentic product?
This is a complex search, but nothing impossible. Essentially what differentiates us from others is us.
We, with our history, our values and principles, our passions, our way of being and communicating.
Very often we reason in a sectarian way, with watertight compartments, so what we study in a school way over the years will only be applied in the workplace, while our childhood memories will be part of and will be cultivated in a family environment. In reality, everything we learn through our experience throughout our lives is a unique and great wealth for us.
The added value and authenticity we are looking for is precisely that wealth.
To make the speech clearer I will give a small example:
"If in a class of 20 children a teacher asked to draw an apple, at the end of the lesson we would probably have 20 different drawings. There would be red apples, green and yellow apples, apples on the tree, apples in a supermarket, apples on a meadow, apples already cut ready to eat, apples with caterpillars and even flying apples (I could give many examples).
If we gave the same task to adults probably everyone would design a classic red apple with a green leaf. Yet think about it: an adult's experience is much broader than a child's. An adult could really draw the same apple in a thousand different ways, yet that doesn't happen.”
The imagination of children is not just a simple fantasy.
What happens very spontaneously in children is that in the drawing they bring back their experience: the precious memory of an apple.
For this reason it would not be strange to find among the drawings 'an apple that has a flower instead of the stem': the flower is the authentic part we are looking for.
To emerge in such a competitive and stimulating world we need to 'only' be consistent with ourselves.
To help us communicate the value of our creations, we can keep these three very important points in mind:
- Authenticity:
- Share your vision
- Being authentic creates a deeper connection with the audience. - Message:
- Think about what message you want to convey with your works.
- Your creations can inspire, educate or sensitise on important topics. - Emotional Impact:
- Artworks often evoke emotions.
- Engage the audience on an emotional level to create a stronger bond.
Using social media to promote your art is a combination of strategy, creativity and perseverance. Sometimes we will have good results, sometimes less, but if we are consistent with ourselves it will still be a nice path.
