Today's siren call for most individuals' lies in our handheld devices. You've probably even heard them call out to you in a multitude of dings, bells and musical cuckoo sounds. Audibly poking at your psyche. Well, besides all that, I want to talk to you more about the aspect of how this stuff works for the artist, graphic designer, crafter and other creative individual trying mightily to command their public's attention at any given moment.
I was introduced into this maddening sphere of notifications from infinite sources while employed for a web development firm, whose sole purpose was to gain its client's numbers by way of followers, email lists, e-commerce, so on and so forth. Any kind of virtual ROI was up for grabs, and often times it felt like I was selling snake-oil due to the overall inconsistency of the world wide web. New sites were popping up everyday that claimed to have innumerable followers and trendsetting interactive features to garner your fans' attention and money. Even five years later, this still seems to be the case. Although there are a handful of successful and engaging sites that can lead to larger numbers. It's all in a matter of knowing your audience.
Facebook, the perennial social media hub. It's where we play games, share pictures, website links and other general stuffs. It's also a commercial war zone, loaded with advertisements and video clips inserted into individual news feeds to attract potential buyers. The scary part about it all is that these advertisements are "smart ads" and are shown to people logged into their account based on their profile preferences, friends lists, and other demographic information. If you've ever paid for a "boost" you'd know that you can pinpoint a highly specific group of people to the letter. Though this will not necessarily give you the biggest bang for your buck.
While you do need to know who to send it out to, you need to know what it is you are selling and to the fringe audience it could sell to as well. Taking that into consideration, how do you find out who that audience is? Is it your mom? Your friends? Your local soccer enthusiasts? Possibly... In order to discover this, you must first create a fan/business page, make a few postings about your product (or your work) and invite all your friends - ALL your friends, yes I also mean that kid from Elementary that friended you and you don't even remember them. You can also place an ad for your page, but you still need to know who your audience is first. The coolest part about having a Fan page is that it will give you metrics and demographics of people that like your page in a simple chart/graph format that you can then utilize in placing advertisements. It will even tell you the time of day when you get the most interaction from your followers than at any other time - this bit is probably the most useful because it translates well to other forms of media sharing, like mailing lists.
Keeping all this in mind, there is also a specific demographic that uses Facebook. Wait, it's not everybody?? Yes, it is definitely not everybody - despite what the media folk are trying to tell you. If your demographic is not between the ages of 16 and 65, with ease of access to the internet, and not phobic of sharing personal information, then Facebook should not be the only place you advertise. Not only because of this margin of demographic, but also because of the many changes to the algorithms over the years Facebook has made it virtually impossible for even your Fans to see the information you post unless you pay to "boost" everything, and even then there is no guarantee. Still, it is essential to utilize their metrics and keep a sounding board on this site.
Twitter is another, "old school" platform for social media. This site has a very narrow demographic of individuals as it leans towards the tech-savvy 25-45 year old adults that use it heavily. It is essentially used to express thoughts in news bite form, making posts truncated or making the reader click through to engage in your topic. This is a great site for figureheads, celebrities, and writers, but not so much for people that need to share lots of visuals all the time. It is also very easy to get lost in the stream of posts and replies, as the ease of posting is definitely there with the ability to tag the topic/interest, it's not quite as easy to filter and identify actionable topics. Especially if your audience is not as inclined to dig for the needle in the technological haystack.
While launching about 4 years after it's parent company Facebook, it definitely shows it's age as the demographic is primarily composed of young adults and teens 13+. There is also a wealth of older Facebook users that also post and socialize here. It is a great cross-over platform and allows for the user to be a bit more creative with their photos. It is now viewed as the ubiquitous photo editing program and engages users with large images in their feeds. This is the ultimate site for audience building for visual creative professionals. Hash-tagging allows outside users to easily find you in the search function and it also utilizes a "newest post" algorithm that pushes images out to every user who views the "Discover" page, much like Pinterest does. Though I am still new to the nuances of how this site works, it seems like the best of a few platforms that have already been available to the public for quite some time. There are no limits to the amount of posts and you can advertise freely by creating graphic images to post - I just wish there was an easier way to post from a desktop!
Pinterest is a form of digital scrapbooking, and with this in mind draws a similar type of audience. It allows for infinite collecting of images and sharing of information between users. If you are a graphic artist of any kind, I'm sure you've used it to help gather information for mood-boards. It seems to have a mostly female demographic, as the top boards always shows "weddings" and "baby" ideas. Though it can be useful to most anyone. There is an unwritten "best-practices" sort of guideline that you should leave the credit/information of the image in the comment section stay if you re-pin. Otherwise things are mostly fair game, and their system for categorizing helps other people find you and your boards with relative ease. There's just so much on there that, much like Twitter, it is easy to get lost unless you already have a large following.
Artist Websites: DeviantArt, Behance, etc
There has been a rise in portfolio sites for artists over the last few years. Free and paid alike. The best ones are free, though there is a TON of competition. The competition factor has its pros and cons, it's what made CGHub the largest and most reliable source for art directors in the entertainment industry to pull talent from. Though you were only seen if you were on the front page. With the tremendous amount of people out there doing creative work, it is almost imperative to be on at least one of these sites and contribute to it regularly. You will gain followers by being friendly and sharing critiques, which is much easier than trying to pay per view. Though the audience that frequents these sites are usually solely other artists, so no selling of wares here, other than showing off what you can do. There are other sites like theiSpot, ChildrensBookIllustration.com, and a variety of others that ask the artist for a sum of money to showcase their work (usually of a certain genre). The money factor does pare down the competition, but make sure you do your research about the best one as not all websites like these are created equal.
LinkedIn is among the top most popular social media websites, but I list this one last because of people's infrequent usage of this site. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn claims to have everyone listed as a member, and that there are more and more new people every day. Though, the people that actually spend time on this site are actually HR and contract agents. The importance of your resume on this website is above and beyond your paper resume, as this one gets seen by both real people and robots. There is limitless potential in the connections you have and make through this site, and many opportunities for freelance and contract gigs you might not acquire otherwise. Keywords are VERY important here and will determine the outcome of someone just viewing your page. Do engage in the groups that are available in your fields of interest, do invite people to add you to their list, do interact and participate in discussions you feel important, because this is the one place where people look for other professionals and money making opportunities on a regular basis. Just don't spend your whole day looking for it.
The magic sauce here is to make sure you have a presence on ALL of them, and make sure to link them back to your website, blog, storefront, social media sites, etc. Make sure that the profile names (and urls) match up, and that you create a brand by utilizing that same name across all media. The internet is about linking links together, because that's how files are accessed, shared and viewed across devices. This one thing will guarantee that your name (the one you used) shows up first in a google search for those keywords. This is the one way that will always make social media work for you - and even better if you get your friends and family to literally share your posts!
What say you? Do you have a favorite site/method that works for you? What is the most surprising avenue of social media that has helped you gain in followers/e-commerce?
Here are the links to my social media pages, feel free to friend and follow!
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