Artdomain Art Marketing Blog

Not posted in quite some time…been extremely busy dealing with another priority but I read a great post on Clint Watson’s blog about artists using  Twitter entitled ‘A Spectacular Way to Avoid Doing What Really Matters’ , and it re-energised me to get blogging again.

In a post in response to Clint’s article, one artist suggested he might be being short sighted about the benefits for artists in using social media.  Here’s my response, which pretty much sums up my thoughts on Twitter:

…..Twitter seems good if you want to connect with other artists, or if you are a non-artist, to sell products / services to artists through relationship building. But I would think it is not so good at connecting with buyers of art for the reasons that Clint outlined - too much + too often. Yes there may be people who have connected and managed to get opportunities that resulted in sales, but I would think this will be the minority.

In my opinion, since there are only so many hours in the day, it is really a matter of what you want to invest your time in. By choosing one thing, you are sacrificing another. If your aim is to produce art and sell art, this is the top priority, and your social media of choice should be the ones that are going to be the most effective.

Blogging is more thoughtful, in my opinion, than twitter, and as a method to connect with buyers, it is more worthwhile. I agree that buyers like to connect with the artist and I see this as a better ‘connection’ as they don’t have to wade through the “having a cup of tea now…and a biscuit” posts to get to the essence of the artist or info on your art.

I’ve seen Facebook used well by some artists to connect to buyers also. But for me, twitter seems to be good for connecting regularly with other artists for a support network. This has value but the time spent is at the sacrifice of something else i.e. creating or marketing art.

Lastly, twitter gives way too much info out into the public domain for my liking - from viewing people’s Twitter profiles you can glean a lot of personal info i.e. how their day is regularly spent, when they go out, come back, who they see regularly etc. All this is for anyone to view not just friends on twitter.

So to summarise, I didn’t see Clint’s post as saying social media doesn’t have any value. Far from it. Just choose your social media carefully - what’s going to give you maximum bang for your buck…so to speak.

If you, dear reader, tweet or don’t tweet, perhaps you would like to leave your thoughts on this social media buzz.