We spend on average one hour a day on Instagram and still, Instagram can be pretty tricky to navigate. As an artist, Instagram is key to getting your art noticed and the strong visual element of Instagram plays in your favour. It may seem daunting but with a bit of TLC, you will start seeing improvements in no time! To help you get started, we have asked our artists to tell us their top 5 tips:
- Keep It Professional
We all love a good night out with our friends but make sure it doesn’t find its way to your art Instagram! Treat your art Instagram as the best business promotional asset you have – it acts as a mobile ‘gallery’ for all our artists. Just like your CV, always ensure your profile bio is up-to-date to direct your audience to your upcoming exhibitions and projects. Consistency is a must to show to potential buyers that you take your practice seriously. Changing your settings to a business Instagram account will enable you to track your audience engagement and gauge the response to your experiments. Finding the right hashtags for your work will go a long way to connect your posts to a like-minded audience.
- Invest In The Aesthetics
First impressions are everything and the best way to make sure you get the job is to plan your outfit the night before and present yourself well. The same applies to your Instagram feed. Think and plan your feed ahead before you post; there are lots of tools out there to help you visualise what your feed would look like. Make sure your content is varied from your latest work in progress to finished artworks in situ or video of you creating and always upload good quality content – in the fast-speed world we live in, no one likes to spend time figuring out what they are looking at!
- Find Your Voice
An aesthetically pleasing feed is important but letting your personality shine through your feed is what will get you a loyal following base. Just like when you meet someone at a party if that person has the looks but nothing interesting to say you quickly find a way to escape the conversation. We have all wondered how this not-so-great-looking feed has such a high number of followers – because people find value in what they say! So take the time to find your voice and reflect on how you want to tell the story behind your art. And remember there are always brownie points for a good sense of humour that makes people chuckle or relate to your posts!
- Engage With The Community
Instagram was created with the aim to foster a sense of community so make sure you invest time in liking and commenting as well as producing content. The potential to grow your audience is based on your interactions and the more you interact with others the more others will respond to your posts. You may even be surprised how quickly you bond with other artists if you reply to comments or ask questions in your captions! Sharing other artists’ content and tagging them is an easy, free and inspiring way to get more visibility while supporting other artists.
This leads us to our last tip.
- Don’t Let It Get To You
It is easy to find in the number of likes or new followers the reassurance of our own worth and if you let it get to you, it can really impact your mental health. Stress when missing the ideal time to post; pressure to produce Instagram worthy content on demand; anxieties when looking at the number of followers, you name it! We have a tendency to constantly compare ourselves to people around us and Instagram is no exception. So here are our final top tips to keep it cool when things get a bit much:
- ‘No one wakes up like this’ so try not to take appearances as face value.
- ‘Followers don’t grow on trees’ so be patient and keep working at it.
- ‘It’s cool to be kind’ so start by not being so harsh on yourself and treat your mental health as your most valuable asset.
- ‘It is not a race but a marathon’ so take a moment to catch your breath and take a break when you need to.
