One lesson I’ve learned during the past years is to never blame anyone when something is not performing at I thought, when it comes to promote a brand or product on social networks. Always Thinking it’s not your fault and you can’t do anything against algorithm changing over time, this is just the best way to never improve yourself or never be able to find a new solution to value your service, and promote them
A lot of people are complaining about algorithm on Facebook, and other social networks but as mentioned above it’s, in my opinion, the worst solution to never take the chance to improve your strategy by simply blaming someone else for your failure.
But as any discipline, having a successful presence on social media requires a real strategy and time. If you’re not ready to spend at least half an hour each day to improve your social media and dedicate half a day each month to study some data to improve your strategy, just forget about it.
So let’s start with some basics and focus on Facebook for the first series of articles.
Understanding what you’re doing with your profile and the difference and a page
One of the major mistakes artists usually do is to use their profile to post everything related to their art and just drop their Page … because it doesn’t work,… because … well you know algorithms….
A personal profile is for friends, family and usually also for people who already know what you’re already doing. You don’t have to spend a lot of energy to get comments/likes and shares because they all already appreciate what you’re doing ( or pretend to )
A Page offers far more options than a personal profile, but its goal is to extend your network and to get more audience (Fans ) for your art/service.
Meanwhile your page grow, you won’t have the same number of likes and shares or comments than in your profile, even if your page is far away bigger than the number of friends in your personal profile.
But think about the role of Page again. A Page is representing your Brand/art to people who sometimes don’t really know what you’ve done in the past or your art.
If you compare a personal profile VS a page, you could think of it as showing your drawings to your parents when you were 7 years old and showing your art to random people when you’re 25 years old
Family and friends will always have compassion for you and will (almost) always like what you’re doing, meanwhile, people from your page, who don’t know you, will be more critic or ignore you. Some will even leave your page if what they saw is not what they were expecting after a few weeks.
Imagine you own a real gallery and for the opening, you’ll invite friends who’ll all come and say nice things about your art and how good you’re. Then you open your gallery the day after to the public, and some random stranger start to look at your art.. some will love it, some will just have a quick look, some will leave within the next minutes, etc…
But at least many new people you never heard before will have seen what you’ve made. Then, the big question is how can I find a way to have most of these random people, start to share my art with more other random people and gain new fans.
How to define a strategy to grow a page.
It’ll be a really frustrating experience and you’ll probably think it’s useless at the beginning of this journey, but if you follow some simple rules you’ll have a page that will grow enough to start attracting new opportunities.
First to be sure you understand the cycle you’ll need to get through to get a strong page, here’re the basic steps :
Defining a Strategy —> Measuring —> Refining the strategy
Defining a Strategy
As an artist, you’re a brand, and you must think of yourself as it. And a brand needs a strategy. The strategy must answer all these questions :
(1) What’s the story?
(2) How will my content be useful for my fans?
(3) How often can I post new content?
(4) What’s my goal with this page
Sounds vague, but let’s try to give you one example answering these points
Example: I want my fans to know my art and spread the word about my talent and sale a few products
(1) What’s the story?
I produce an average of 4 new illustrations each month and I’ll share with my fans the creative process behind each of them
(1a) How can I share this story ?
I’ll post one new illustration process each week.
The plan will be to :
– Day 1: show the final illustration
– Day 2 to Day 5: Show a breakdown still of the illustration
– Day 6: Show a recap of all steps + final
– Day 7: Tease what’s next and ask my audience what they’ve loved or not
(2) How will my content be useful for my fans?
Sharing the process will show some techniques I use and allow some of my fans to learn new tricks but also leave them with questions
(3) How often can I post new content?
It all depends on me and I can easily create one new illustration/week and record some steps
(4) What’s my ultimate goal with this page?
Create a Tutorial Series after a few months with more in depth details about my process. My fan will get access to a free chapter or a special preview.
There’re tons of other strategies that could be described, but the goal of this article is not to give you an endless list and the best if it to imagine something that fits your brand/art
Measuring / Understanding
So you’ve started your page and began to stick to the plan and despite your effort, you don’t see a lot of tractions and interactions ( these damned algorithms !)
Depending on the number of fans you already gathered the strategy will be different. But please don’t ruin everything by still posting the same content on your Profile as on your Page! The content on your page MUST be different and shared from there to your Profile, remember it’s not the same audience as in your Page and you’ll need to deploy more effort to convince people on your page to love what you’re doing.
I’ll go into details regarding this part in a live if you’re interested and explain how you can easily refine your strategy to grow your page and get a better % of reach and have more people to share your content from your page to improve your audience.
If you’re interested in a follow up of this article, please subscribe to our IAMAG YT Channel where I’ll start to share some live episode mid-august 2020
Credits : All Illustrations by Pawel Kuczynski
