6 Instagram Tips for Artists to Grow and Convert Their Audience

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

This question applies to artists on Instagram. With so many talented people with artworks to die for, it’s not easy to get the attention of people who might appreciate your work.

However, Instagram marketing is all about branding and positioning — your success will depend on how far you’re willing to go and how bad do you want to make your mark as an artist online.

Below are tips on how artists such as yourself can leverage this social media platform to garner more followers and acquire more clients from the art you create.

Optimize Your Images

This sounds like basic advice, but it bears repeating:

Make sure your visuals look GREAT on Instagram.

Whether you’re a graphic artist or designer, there’s no excuse for your posts to NOT look good.

Below are other tips for divine Instagram posts:

● If you’re taking a photo of physical work (painting, sculpture, etc.), use a high-quality camera and be mindful of the lighting and white space for optimal effect.

● Don’t just let your photos speak for themselves — tell stories in the captions!

● Consistently post things that make sense and are in line with your brand.

Aside from making your post appear immaculate, you also have to determine the endgame of the post you publish. Building followers is one thing, but how is it going to support your artistic endeavors?

As artists, you would also want people to either hire you for your services or buy your work.

Therefore, always include a call to action at the bottom of each image your share on Instagram.

For instance, you want to include a direct link to your online store to mobilize people into buying them.

Leverage Video Content

A great way to promote your art is by creating videos about it. Choose among the many types to create and share on your Instagram account:

● Feeds — Use on-to-go to create authentic content for your audience.

● Stories — Helps build brand awareness to your art especially to people who haven’t followed you yet.

● IGTV — Put your creative cap on and showcase your products to people that put your brand at the forefront.

● Live Video — Take videos in real-time to engage with your community, show your works in progress, and/or get a sale.

● Reel Videos — Creative fun and engaging content similar to TikTok.

● Video ads — Increase your reach and generate more interest in your art. As a paid marketing channel, ensure that your ads will provide you with an ROI to justify costs.

When creating these on your Instagram account, you need to be mindful of the time limit allotted for each video type. By knowing how long or short an Instagram video is, you can produce the best possible content for your artworks to be shown to the crowd.

Maximize Visibility

Sometimes, it’s not good enough to just publish a powerful post about your art. Your posts must be easy to find on Instagram to get more eyeballs to it and receive the likes and comments it deserves.

To do this, you must include the right hashtags for each of your content. They help enable your audience to find your content because of the hashtags you’ll be using.

JARVEE has an excellent Hashtag research feature to help you find the ones to use for your content. Using Dynamic Hashtags, the tool will cycle common hashtags across all your posts. This way, you don’t keep using the same hashtags consecutive times, making your updates appear more organic in the process!

Research the Competition and Its Followers

To succeed in the competitive arena, you need to know what your competitors are up to. This is a social media growth hack that applies to other platforms too.

First, you need to scour the competition and gain insights into their posting strategy. Here a few questions to ask yourself when looking at their profiles:

● What types of posts do they publish (videos, images, personal, etc.)?

● Why do they share these on Instagram (to grow followers, to get clients, advertising opportunities, etc.)

● What content do people respond to the most?

From here, you’ll have a basic idea of the things you could emulate on your Instagram account.

Next, look for people who follow similar artists but not you. The fact that they follow them could mean they might be interested in your artworks as well.

You can use JARVEE to gather followers, likers, and commenters of your competitors. The goal here is to hopefully turn them into your followers as well. The fact that they’re following similar artists gives you a good chance of turning them into followers if you play your cards right.

But for that to happen, you need to understand why they follow your competitors in the first place. By adopting some of the tactics they use on Instagram, you can strengthen your case of turning them into followers once you start reaching out to them.

Make a Compelling Case in Your Bio

Your Instagram bio serves as a bridge between people becoming followers or clients.

Think of the images you share as bait. If people take the bait, they’ll go straight to your bio section to learn more about you and your work.

The problem with Instagram’s bio section is that it leaves little to no room for you to introduce yourself properly.

Aside from the character count, you can’t link out to your website even from your bio section. Crazy, I know!

However, take this as a challenge to get creative in optimizing your bio, which is key to artists who sell their work online.

A way of doing this is by using a link in the bio tool. Create a page that compiles links to your social media and your best works that you can’t post on Instagram.

This way, you have all the important information that everyone needs to know about you as an artist in a single place such as videos, sample works, and more. Then just link to the page on your bio for everyone to see.

Jump Into Conversations

As with most social platforms, engagement in the name of the game. The more you build connections with users about your art and art in general, the more they will become aware of what you do. Depending on how your conversation goes there, they will either follow you or at the very least become aware of your knowledge in the arts.

The best way to do this is by using social media monitoring tools like Awario to track keywords and phrases related to your industry. It scours different platforms online for content where your keywords are mentioned.

For Instagram posts, leave comments that bring value to the users. You don’t want to enter a disingenuous comment like “great job” or “awesome post” because it doesn’t add anything to the conversation.

What you’re looking for by doing this is engagement. You want to reach out and craft long-lasting connections that will cast a positive light on your brand.

If you’re the one receiving messages from users on Instagram and other social media platforms, JARVEE allows you to manage direct messages and comments in a single dashboard. This allows you to connect with everyone efficiently and without flipping from a platform to another.

Conclusion

As you can see, becoming a successful artist on Instagram takes more than just creating the perfect post or displaying your art.

The bulk of the work will come from engaging with users to cut through the noise. And by building relationships with your target audience, you can drive more interest to your artwork and services, if not get more likes and build the following you deserve!

To help in this process of outreach and engagement on Instagram, JARVEE will help you automate the boring tasks so you can focus on acting upon things that matter.

Originally published at https://jarvee.com/6-instagram-tips-for-artists-to-grow-and-convert-their-audience/