Social media can help you organize all your work in one place, connect with others that share your interests and passions, expand your audience, and create buzz. Few artists these days get recognized without a strong social media presence, and beyond recognition, you’ll find yourself connecting with artists who inspire you to take new directions with your work.
It’s a quickly growing standard in creative industries to make connections and get jobs through social media. Here are some helpful tips to help you better utilize your social media to market and make connections.
Organize your content ahead of time.
If you are posting a variety of different media, figure out a combination in which you’ll post your content. For example, post a video one day and then post a screenshot from that video the next day.
If you are posting primarily photos, you can organize by theme, color scheme, or purpose. Organize your content allows you to have a nicely flowing feed, which makes it easy for people to go through your profile and get a feel for your work. Create a content calendar on a Word or Excel doc to organize your content and to visualize what your feed will look like.
Create a schedule and stick to it!
In order to have an engaging social media page, the single most important thing is to post frequently. If you are just starting out, ease into posting at least once per day. Multiple posts are okay if you post varied content, however you probably shouldn’t post more than 2 or 3 times a day to refrain from being too “spammy.”
There are many tools to help you stay on top of your schedule and that allow you to post consistently without letting it take over your life. Free social media management tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite can help you schedule your posts and then will post them at the time scheduled.
Share your work across all your platforms.
If you are using multiple channels for social media, be sure to share your content on everything. This is important because each social media platform attracts differents kinds of users. You may be surprised by where your work takes off, so don’t close doors ahead of time. Plus, if people follow you on multiple platforms, then you can be sure that your work is seen. Doing this also shows consistency.
Look for what works.
Many social media platforms give you access to insights and analytics to see how your posts perform. They can get very specific and will be able to inform you about many things including follower demographics, the time your content gets the most engagement, and which posts perform well on the platform.
Some forms of media may perform better on certain social media platforms than others, for example, videos yield higher engagement on Facebook. You can use these insights to tailor your content calendar so that you can get more engagement and activity.
Engage with other artists!
It’s always nice to receive likes and comments on your work, so always return the favor. Comment and engage on other artists’ posts as well. Not only is this a nice gesture and makes the other artists feel good, but this also helps you get your name out there. Comments come up on feeds and often times, it can compel others to find your click on your profile. They don’t have to be lengthy, short ones do the the trick.
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Careers in Media Technology
Stanford University