Lesson 2

Mastering your social media strategy is essential as an artist today

You heard it many times, but you’re not doing it consistently.

Having a social media strategy doesn’t mean posting randomly on Instagram or Facebook. Major platforms are overcrowded and don’t bring any value to the artists per se.

Having a social media strategy is not the same thing as having a communication strategy.

Communication deals with public relations, and generally speaking showing what you do as an artist. It’s a great tool to build what we covered before, i.e. a personal brand.

However, when it comes to promoting your work, you immediately fall into what we wall the “algorithm trap”: billions of people are posting content on each platform every minute, and if you don’t get celebrity endorsement or some substantial collaborations going on, it will lead you nowhere.

From there, you have two options.

The first one is to use paying ads with Facebook and/or Google. It works quite well, and we’ll cover this topic in a few weeks (you’ll see even a tiny budget can bring awesome results if done properly).

The second one is to use those social networks not as a promotion platform, but rather as an online resume. The difference is huge.

When you use social networks as a promotion platform, you’re looking for a high reach (i.e. the number of people who will actually see your content). In that case, you should follow all the known best practices: appealing images, with strong captions and a few hashtags. It can bring you a few hundreds of new followers each month if you post consistently.

But there’s a tough issue: it takes a long time if you don’t use paying ads as well. Why? Because of a terrible phenomenon called “declining reach”.

What does it mean?

Back in 2010, when you posted something on Facebook, for instance, the vast majority of your friends / followers were able to actually see your content on their newsfeed. And years after years, the proportion progressively declined… and is now close to 1% for Facebook pages.

1%? Yes. When you post something on Facebook today, only 1 to 5% of your current followers will actually see the content (it’s much higher for personal and non-business related profiles however). The same thing is happening on Instagram, YouTube…

Why? For two obvious reasons.

1. All the people in the world are posting on social networks, therefore, you’re constantly in competition with one another.
2. Those platforms want to take your money, and force you, as a professional artist, to pay for ads. Which, in some way, makes sense.

The problem is 99% of artists ignore that phenomenon. Therefore, when they don’t get a substantial amount of “likes” or “comments”, they feel sad. Actually, you shouldn’t pay too much attention to that as, again, the algorithm is killing everything.

But the good news is: you can STILL use social media as an online resume, and it can work very well.

What do we mean by online resume?

When you post something related to you (as a personal brand) or to your work (as an artist), you always have two intents: get the attention of random people who could appreciate your work, and get the attention of the industry you’re in (which is a different segment).

Even though social networks are now declining when it comes to promoting content, they’re still super strong tools to show what you do to the industry people. Why? Because the industry doesn’t care (too much) about your followers. They know how the business works -all the algorithm restrictions- because they suffer from it too.

That’s why you should use social media primarily as an online resume to get in touch with people of your particular industry. And when you’ll be ready, you will do what every business is forced to do nowadays: paying ads.

What’s the difference between this strategy and what you’re already doing?

The “standard” strategy is not only damaged by the declining reach phenomenon, it’s also really depressing. At Connan School, we still see a lot of artists thinking they don’t have talent because they only get 50 or 100 likes on every post. But that doesn’t mean anything! Basically, if some really untalented artist spends $10.000 on paying ads, he would probably have a substantial amount of likes / comments etc. It’s called “pay for play”. Talent has nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, you can be a poor artist with exceptional talent, but very few likes / followers etc. And that’s exactly what this program is about: give you the techniques to grow your exposure with little to no budget. That’s a hard goal, but it’s achievable if you do the homeworks.

However, and all things considered, you need to understand how exactly did social media change the art industry (in the broad sense).

Before the internet, and especially before the launch of Facebook, talent was reserved to a small amount of people around the world. It was not easy to emerge, but still a lot easier than today.

Nowadays, as you know, ANYONE can become the next thing in all entertainment industries. That doesn’t mean art is dead. But that means you’re now literally competing with 13-year old “stars” that are filming their everyday life on TikTok or Snapchat. Even though you’re not doing the same thing, they’re still competitors because they’re in the same arena as you: the impersonal algorithm.

For all these reasons, you absolutely need to understand how important is art marketing, to emerge in this world. A lot of artists have a very big ego and think someone will knock at their door with a million dollar deal. That is not going to happen. Not anymore.

In that context, you urgently need to understand the business aspect of the industry.

As competition is bigger than ever, you can’t say to yourself you’re just an artist. If you’re willing to sell art and make a living from it, you must consider you’re ALSO a business.

Successful artists are also clever entrepreneurs, but the vast majority of emerging artists don’t understand that. That’s also why a lot of them are not willing to spend a few dollars for any investment in their career. “Oh! I need to pay for that? Go away, I’m a talented artist!” Those same people will be able to spend $1.200 for a new iPhone but they don’t want to pay more than $50 or $100 for an investement in their career. It doesn’t make any sense.

The truth is: if you’re not making a living from your art today, that means you need to make further investments in your career (whether monetary or non-monetary ones). That’s a totally different mind spirit you need to adopt.

To sum up:

1. Social media are massively overcrowded and it’s getting worse each year
2. Social media can still be relevant with paying ads or as an online resume
3. Artists are in competition with millions of talents around the world, even amateur and/or untalented ones
4. Artists must adopt a strong business-oriented mindset, and make regular investments in their career.

You want to be a successful artist? Be also a successful entrepreneur.

Recap

Homework

For this lesson, you will need to record a 60-second video reel to introduce yourself (your artist name, your specialty, your recent works… and anything that can be interesting for a “cold” audience, i.e. for people who don’t know you yet and want to learn more about yourself).

We recommend you use a portrait format. When you’re done, go to your Connan School profile > Documents > Upload files > Drop files. We only accept Zip and Rar files. Be sure you set it to “public” so that we can access the file at anytime.