Social Media and artists: the growing love-hate relationship

"This post might include affiliate links, cause I need to pay my bills."

Artists these days have a love-hate relationship with Social Media and I’m one of them as well. Social Media is great in some of its aspects but a pain in the butt for others. And more so lately.

In the past three years, everything has moved to SM where it be Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter, or YouTube. Everything is digital and shareable. But because more and more people were using SM for free advertising and posting continuously their products the sites have become oversaturated with promotions and advertisements. The sites as well noticed this trend and started to implement special algorithms to make the experience for a simple individual more feathered to their needs and focused on their preferences.

Growing your business through SM has been the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to go.

But not so much lately. It is getting harder and harder to get noticed, your posts are calculated by the amount of likes, shares, and comments it gets from your existing audience, and then it is shown to others. Your posts get hidden within a flood of other similar posts with similar hashtags.

There were and still are some benefits from promoting your art through social media, such as it’s free, easy to use, you gain followers faster, it opens more possibilities and brings more people to your art, you gain recognition faster (good and bad), can also get job opportunities.

But since lately everybody is promoting their business or hobby on social media there is a flood of posts going through the feed that sometimes makes you feel like not even opening the app. Every third individual is an influencer or content creator and is promoting and sharing their art online.

The thing is social media feeds have become so fast that if you want your post to be seen by people you need to keep up with the program. This means you need to post regularly, preferably every other day and at a specific time of the day, just so the algorithm acknowledges your presence and shows your posts to people.

Some platforms even implemented an algorithm where if your followers don’t engage with your posts in any shape or form your posts are then not shown to other people, so gaining new followers and making possible sales is almost impossible. Thus, making it harder to make money from SM marketing.

There is one solution. Either you hire someone to do the SM marketing for you so you can focus on your art. Or just because you are trying to keep up with the algorithms you risk losing quality and start focusing on the quantity.

At the end of the day, you may as well check in to a looney bin and declare yourself insane. Because keeping up with the algorithms and also producing good quality art is almost impossible, even when you already have a great following, not to mention if you don’t have it yet.

If you wish to be on top or stay on top, you need to post almost every second day otherwise you’re just going to be crushed by the algorithm and forgotten in the flood of all the other artists that are after the same thing as you are. Get your art seen by as many people as possible which will hypothetically bring you sales so you can pay your bills and live like a normal person.

I’m not saying SM is bad. It’s not. It has its pros and cons. The good side is you get to connect to like-minded people from around the world instantly. You can exchange experiences, knowledge, and views. You can even form long-term friendships. Just be mindful of not being sucked up in chasing the algorithm.