This is a post made for my fellow artist friends on Tumblr who have recently started, or are planning on starting to promote/sell their artwork via Instagram.
Instagram is a great platform to get some visibility for your art and there are collectors and galleries who actively search for new artists from Instagram. It helps if you update your profile into a professional account and this way you also get some more features you can utilize. Still, it is easy to kind of get lost into the mass and it takes time and active posting to get some visibility and there really is no guarantee that you will succeed.
Especially when you are starting out you have to learn to deal with different kind of scammers. These are usually users, who comment on your posts offering different kinds of paid promotion. DO NOT fall for this, just delete the comments and block the senders. They promise you more followers and more visibility for your art by showing some pieces of your choice on their page, but this will only get more scammers pointed to your way and in the worst case scenario, fill your follower count with "fake followers" and bots. You can check out some of these "promotional pages" and click on some of the artists whose works they have shared and come to this conclusion by yourself. I have humored myself by asking some of these blogs what they are actually offering and the answers are usually almost identical, looking something like this:
You might also get some fake customers into your dm:s, "wanting to purchase some of your art". This is a difficult one, because although these are usually quite easy to recognize as scammers, one doesn't want to lose potential sales in case of misjudgement of character.
I had one scammer, who was quite convincing. They also had a facebook profile and good English and could estimate the cost of shipping almost to the point, before I had a chance to do so myself. But when it got to the actual payment, that was going to be done via PayPal (I usually prefer straigh transfers to my bank account) there seemed to be a "problem" with the payment transfer and I got an email from "Paypal" confirming this. This was delivered to my spam folder and a quick check confirmed that the email was fake. This would have required me to transfer a specific amount of money to the buyers account to confirm the transaction of a larger sum that buyer had provided and after this I would be compensated with the full amount.
I called bullshit and at this point the "buyer" started guilttripping me and accusing ME of scamming. Soon after they deactivated their Instagram profile.
This is just one example and I recommend being cautious when accepting payments via PayPal, it's not the most reliable form of payment. Also, it's easy to make a fake "receipt" of a confirmed PayPal transfer.
I also recommend having a separate page for the actual purpose of selling your art where you can list the prices and more information about your art. You can and should put a link to this page into your instagram bio.
Hope this might be of any help to someone, feel free to add things that might come to mind.
