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Artist and Social Network
As you may know, social media is an important advantage for artists all around the world. It gave us a chance to introduce our work to a large public without having to travel. It is really a golden age for the exposure of artist creation. As the phenomenon growth though, companies saw a new way to advertise themselves also. When they boarded the bandwagon, social media favoured the exposure of paying partners. Since most of artists don’t have the money to pay the advertisement, most of them fell behind.
You surely became aware that you see more and more paid publicity over your family and friends news on your personal feed. It’s the consequence of the monetization of social media. When you follow a page, like an artist page, you will often miss their publication. With that in mind, I’ve decided to concentrate my effort on site that really help me get feedback and comments from my followers. I don’t see the point upload things if nobody sees it.
1) My own website
With our habit to navigate in one place for every news, we kind of lost interest in websites. Usually to tend to visit them for a precise purpose and not just discovering them. I think of my website as my home. When you come to visit, you can experience a total immersion in my own world and see all I have to share. I’m also free to share anything I want because there is less rules than on social media.
2) Artistic showcase platform
Websites like Artstation, Deviantart and Behance are the best for us. It enables artists to showcase their portfolios in a slick way, discover & stay inspired, and connect with new opportunities. Also when you follow someone, you will have notifications of all the work they will post. They also have their own system to stack the new art so you can review them later and be sure that you don’t miss anything. The downside of them is that usually they are not visited by a large and varied public. Usually it is used by people of the industry and artist themselves. It is harder to get a vast audience of followers.
3) Social Network
The downside of artistic showcase platform is the main characteristic of social media. Since social networks if now part of our everyday life, it is easy to connect with new people via them. Through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I get to have followers from around the world and from different environment. It’s also very easy to share the things we like and see with other people without leaving the application.
The platform I decided to let go and why.
Google + : a Facebook like network but with a lot fewer people using it. Very hard to reach new followers through it. Who knows, maybe someday it will gain more success, but for now I will not update it anymore.
Linked in : I’ll keep my resume and status up to date but I don’t see the point of posting art weekly on it. People don’t tend to comment and share, they are more interested in my resume and will often go directly on my website to learn more about my work.
Tumblr : Tumblr is really a rollercoaster type of networking. Things tent to not work well or become a huge success. I think a bit of luck is involved in this, you have to be shared by the good person to have a snowball effect. Tumblr committed suicide for the artistic community this year with their new policy about nudity. I think most of social networks are now used by really young people and they want to make sure they don’t see disturbing things. The bad side of this is that some artist uses the human nudity in their work to express the fragility, innocence, feelings, etc. Those artistic representation is judged as bad as pornographic content and is, in my opinion, a bad way of censuring expression. I don’t illustrate that kind of artwork but I can easily see the struggle for other artists.
Thank you for your time and your support. I hope I could give you a better understanding of your impact on the artist and the way you can help them growth.
A friendly reminder of how to support an artist (based on @imzeferino post )!
If you have money to help:
- Be a patron; website as Patreon, Tipee, Ko-fi let you help artists directly!
- Ask for commissions; you get personalized art and help them live from their art!
- Buy their product; visit the artist page to verify their retail outlet to make sure you buy from the right place and not from scam vendors using other people's art!
If you don’t have money to help:
- Like their posts!
- Leave nice comments!
- Share their art!
- Tell your friends about them!