Posting art on Facebook is surely a great method to increase the visibility of your portfolio. But you need to know that just uploading your artwork on Facebook won’t do the job (anymore). Facebook has been changing quite a bit over the years. Its algorithm has become quite restrictive and made it harder for social media artists to gain outreach. These 7 DOs help you make the best of your Artist Facebook Page, without having to pay for Facebook ads!
With 2 billion+ users, Facebook is the largest social network out there. Facebook can help you establish yourself as an artist, expand your web presence, and directly connect with those interested in your work.
When you post art on Facebook in form of public posts, various people can like and react to your images and share them with their friends. This in turn will increase your chances of reaching even more art enthusiasts.
How to protect Your Art on Facebook?
When posting art on Facebook, you might worry that people use it without your permission or claim it as there own. Your worries are for a good reason. It happens more often than not that pictures are stolen online.
To find out how you can protect your art, check out my blog post on the → 7 PRO TIPS How To Protect Your Art Online.
This brings us to the next question:
Is Facebook Good for Artists?
Like any other social media platform, Facebook has its ups and downs for everybody – including artists that put their work out on the platform.
Still, due to its wide outreach, Facebook is a place where artists can connect with a huge number of fellow artists, art enthusiasts, publishers and buyers from all over the world.
The flipside of so many people posting on Facebook is the resulting information overload that is consistently getting worse.
You’ve surely noticed yourself: You could be constantly looking at your Facebook feed and still there’s always something new that you haven’t seen yet.
This is where the somehow addictive nature of Facebook comes in.
The app keeps sending you notifications throughout the day (– if you allow it!). Depending on whether the notification brings good news or bad news, it can trigger different emotions in you.
To find out how these hormone rushes can affect your well-being and what to do to not trade your art for the social media razzle-dazzle, read my related post → Should I Post My Art On Instagram?.
Another thing you’ve surely heard about is ‘social media detox’. People close their FB account temporarily or permanently because they feel way better and less stressed without Facebook.
Indeed, Facebook can suck lots of energy off of you – if you allow it! 😉 It can feel like people competing for attention with more and more trivial posts, still measuring themselves by the likes and comments they get for these posts.
The ‘social reward system’ docks on to our most biological and social cues making us crave for constant external approval.
This in-turn pressures us to show only our good side. People either join the play pretend game, or start getting frustrated seeing all the ‘perfect life’ pictures while their own life is currently everything but perfect.
How do I advertise My Art on Facebook?
Facebook started off as a great platform to connect with an audience and an awesome community building tool. It was an efficient and time-worthy promotional tool for artists, but not so much anymore.
The huge amount of posts published every day makes it impossible for Facebook to show all your friends’ posts on your newsfeed. That’s why FB developed an algorithm that sorts out what you see and what you don’t see on your feed.
You’ve surely noticed that only posts of the same dozen people pop up when you log into Facebook, even though you have a thousand+ friends. This is the result of Facebook’s algorithm.
What you need to know about Facebook’s Algorithm
What posts Facebook shows you depends on many factors: your recent interactions with friends, your focus of interests, but also on how much money people are ready to pay to promote their content.
There’s also something called the ‘echo chamber’ effect of Facebook. Facebook selects mostly those posts that it assumes you’re interested in and agree with based on your previous interactions.
That means FB doesn’t show your posts to all of your fans or friends. Instead, the algorithm selects people who have shown an interest in your content by liking, sharing, or commenting on it in the past.
Facebook seems to be cutting down the organic reach of its members more and more. Over the years, the network has changed its algorithm in a way that it favors paid content over free posts. Artists who spent time and effort to develop their pages see their reach diminish dramatically.
If you’re an artist with a business page, your analytics will show you that your posts organically reach only 2 to 9% of the people that are following you!
Facebook lets you know how many people ‘only’ saw your content and at the same time offers you the possibility to ‘boost’ your post on your business page. In other words, you have to pay for people to see you.
If you still want to do Paid Advertising
At the end of the day, it’s your choice as an artist if you want to pay FB for advertising your art or not. Despite all the drawbacks, there are still many good reasons to post art on Facebook.
First of all, more than half of all Facebookers use the app on a daily basis. That means you have the chance to get your art in front of one billion of people every single day!
The average user spends more than 15 hours per week on Facebook. That’s around 2 hours a day where art lovers, curators and potential buyers can see your art!
Facebook ads are easy to use and very targetable. You can select your audience by age, nationality, gender, and location. You can also choose to only show your adverts to a group of people with specific interests or that belong to a certain FB group or fan page.
As an artist, you would obviously select those people that are interested in your particular style of art.
In terms of a Facebook artist page vs. business page, you will need to have a business page, if you decide to sell your art directly on the platform.
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But regardless of whether you decide to showcase your art for free or pay for promotional ads, there are always a couple of things that help get your art page going. Find out more in the next section!
7 DOs to Post Art on Facebook
Sign up for a Personal FB Page (not a Fan Page)
As I mentioned above, if you’re not planning to sell your art directly on Facebook, you can sign up for a personal page.
Since Facebook’s algorithm has been restricting the reach of Fan and Like pages significantly, posts on your personal profile get definitely more visibility than posts on a page.
Apart from that, you spare yourself the additional step of first connecting with somebody via your personal page only to then invite them to ‘Like’ your artist fan page. Some people might feel you overdo it when they are prompted to like another page of yours right after having made friends with you on your personal artist Facebook page.
Furthermore, the invitation to Like your page often gets buried in the multitude of notifications a user receives from Facebook every day.
Make sure you keep the content on your personal FB page relevant to your art and don’t post overly off-topic content. Remember, people connect with you as an artist because they expect to see specific artsy stuff from you!
On the other hand, Facebook is social media, and you’re promoting yourself as well as your work. So, instead of only posting your latest creations, you can try varying your types of posts. One day you can post a status update, the next day a WiP video of you creating the artwork, the day after a little blurb about what inspired you, the day after that you post art on Facebook again, and so on.
Make your Profile Nice and Informative
When setting up your FB page, fill in as much information about yourself as an artist as possible. You can use part of your artist statement in the About section.
Be sure to add links to your other social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., to your own website or blog, and to any other artist platform you’re on. Facebook allows you an unlimited number of links, so make use of it!
Also make sure to include contact information, so people interested in your art can reach out to you easily.
When coming up with a name for your new art page, use your artist name under which you’re known. If your alias is taken, try adding words related to your art, without making it too difficult to remember!
Your cover photo is the biggest feature on your FB page, and probably the first thing your profile visitors will see when coming to your page. That makes your cover photo a wonderful space to capture immediate attention for your art.
Use a picture that is relevant to your art and make it look good. You can add text to your picture or even create a collage of different artworks of yours.
→ How To Make A Photo Grid In Photoshop – (FREE Grid Collage Template!)
Just keep in mind that people are generally more drawn to pictures than words. Studies suggest that you should reduce text to less than 20% of the image.
Join Facebook Art Sharing Groups
Facebook Groups are a great way to create more exposure for your art and to connect with other artists.
What’s more, posts published in a group are seen by a higher number of people. Users get a notice when a post is published to a group way more often than when a post is published to a page!
So, these are some good reasons to join art groups that match the type of art you are doing.
There are many great art groups for all types of art and from all over the world. Some also provide, for example, tutorials on how to create art with Photoshop. You can be part of a community of like-minded people who are interested in the same art as you are. You can learn from them and inspire or teach others!
Before you join a group, always check how active the group actually is. Some groups may have a huge amount of members but low engagement. You can see that by looking at the posts in the group. Do members post regularly? Do their posts get a good number of likes and comments? In some groups, you may also see the view count for each post.
Be sure the groups you join have a large enough membership and engagement (regular posts with a good amount of likes and comments). If likes and comments are low, there’s not much engagement in the group going on. You probably don’t want to waste time and effort posting in that group.
You can also check how many members there are in the group. The more members, the better for your exposure. However, there’s nothing wrong with small groups, if you find the group’s theme interesting. What matters is the engagement in the group.
Network with Like-Minded People
Being part of a Facebook art group is a fabulous way to connect with like-minded people. You will be able to meet many other artists, art enthusiasts, and potentially art collectors and publishers. Get engaged with them and add them to your friends list.
Engaging with other members in groups by commenting and participating in conversations will add to your exposure. People will get curious about you and check out your page after seeing your comments and posts.
Another part of engagement is staying active in Facebook’s art community. ‘Like’ the pages of your favorite artists, art galleries and magazines. Check out what the big influencers are doing. Look how they post art on Facebook, how they caption their posts, how they bring in variety…
Also check out artist Facebook page examples to stay up-to-date with trends in the industry and get inspiration for promoting your own FB page. Comment on their posts, participate in discussions, ask questions, post helpful tips, and link to articles that people will ‘Like’ and share. Experiment a bit to see what your audience is interested in.
Once you start making posts and receiving feedback, you will quickly understand what type of content they like and what they don’t care about.
This is one of the best ways to get noticed and drive traffic to your artist page!
Post Consistently
Like on every other social media platform, it’s important to post art on Facebook on a regular basis.
There’s no rule for how often you should post. Anything between once to three times a week is fine.
People are often anxious to know what’s the best time to post on Facebook. Relax, there’s no ‘best time’ to post your art on Facebook.
Depending on who you ask, every study will tell you a different time that is best to post art on Facebook. This can be between 1 – 3 p.m. during the week and on Saturdays, 1 – 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, or 1 – 4 p.m. on weekends.
And keep in mind: these studies were all done on the US-American market. However, there’s a worldwide audience on Facebook. So, even if you post when the majority of Americans is asleep, you will still be able to reach people in Japan or Australia that are awake at the same time!
There’s no point in trying to avoid competition during peak hours. Any time you post on Facebook, you’re essentially competing against at least 1,500 other posts!
At the end of the day, there’s no need to lose sleep over the best time to upload your artwork on Facebook. Any time will do!
Give your Posts a Personal Touch
When people scroll through their Facebook newsfeeds, make sure to capture their attention.
The easiest way is to add a couple of personal words below the images you post. Let your viewers know what inspired you to do this piece of work, what was particularly fun and hard about it, or what your work process looked like.
People feel generally more drawn to view and follow content when it reveals something about the person behind.
Don’t forget to caption your artworks with title, year, dimensions (if applicable), and techniques and materials used. You can also add the price of your work so buyers know immediately for how much they can acquire the piece.
However, when promoting your work, make sure to not come across overly salesy! Nobody likes to see a never-ending sales ballyhoo. So, instead of just posting your newest pieces along with their price, be sure to vary your posts and make them relatable to your audience!
Last but not Least: Create your own Facebook Art Sharing Group!
The last tip to become successful as an artist on Facebook is to create your own group!
Choose your favorite art style as the main theme for your group and start inviting your friends and other artists of the same genre.
That way, you give other artists a chance to network and showcase their work, while getting more exposure and followers for your own art at the same time.
You can make the group an art sharing only group or also give room for tutorials, and other tips and tricks relating to the specific art style.
Learn more about Social Media for Artists:
Do you post art on Facebook? What are your experiences? If you found these tips helpful, please share them with other artists! … and don’t forget to connect on my FB page! See you there, Angie 😘
