What Every Artist Needs to Know About Instagram

Instagram for Artists Part One

🎤Audio Version

🎤Audio

A lot of artists think that Instagram is a minefield of algorithmic soup. And I’ve seen people not post their work on Instagram for a number of different reasons, such as:

They don’t want anyone to see their work.

They don’t like Meta.

There’s this kind of pull between wanting to be visible and wanting to be invisible.

Not really knowing the format, the process, what to do, how to do it.

This notion that in some way it’s kind of like selling out.

You think it’s just not right for you.

You think there’s something wrong or bad about it.

you’re actually scared; scared of being seen, scared of success, scared of failing, scared of the unknown, scared of change, scared of it working out, scared of it not working out.

There’s a kind of innocence, naivety about keeping things just as they are, because then you can always then say, “Well, you know, Instagram didn’t work for me” or “I don’t like social media.”

You say you haven’t got time for social media. You hate social media. You don’t agree with social media, and you don’t have time to post.

I would argue that all of these reasons are mindsets, ideology, and belief systems. Because if you have time to create, then you have time to share what you create with the world. And let me assure you that once you have got your Instagram account up and working and this goes the same for websites too, you then have to do quite a lot of strategic engaging in order for people to see your work.

I like to think of social media, especially Instagram, as a networking tool. When I first moved over to Instagram from Facebook, I went there because I had heard that it was a visual platform. And as a visual platform, and being a very beauty-inspired, visual person, I wanted to practice my photography, and I committed to taking a photograph every day and posting it on there in the beginning. And what I found is that the community on Instagram, even though it may be made up of millions of people, was different. The quality of energy was different from what it was over on Facebook, and that I had the courage to post more different things on my Instagram than I did on my Facebook.

I like to think of Instagram and social media as a whole as a networking, a community and a way of connecting with people who you might make new friends with, or might collaborate with, who might make up some of your offline community, and who may well very well become your clients and buy your work. For all the negative things that people might like to say about social media, one of the positive things is that it is what we have at our fingertips. And yet, on the one hand, we have this saturation, this proliferation of information that we didn’t have before. But it also gives us an opportunity to connect wider and deeper, and spread the word, and share our love with more people and more places, like never before.

Looking back to the points I’ve made about why artists tend not post on Instagram, and then what happens when they do. I have seen artists of all levels; from 100 to 100,000 followers, be successful in their engagement. So I think that you need to think of it in the same way that you might need to think of showing your art, like exhibitions and galleries and collaborations and art fairs and holistic fairs. And if you think about the places that you might go to share and show your work offline, it’s the same as sharing and showing your work online. It does not need to take up 40 hours a week. Though, saying that, of course, if you had 40 hours a week or you had someone working for you 40 hours a week, you would see a very fast growth in your engagement and turnover. But many of us do not have 40 hours a week to give to working on social media, and don’t want to, for whatever reason, hire somebody to do that for us.

So it’s a simple question of shifting the way that you think about sharing and showing your work. Promotion and marketing and social media marketing are simply ways of connecting with new people who don’t know about you yet. And so, for me, I think the most important thing is to post. The second important thing is to engage, and the third important thing is to find a regular rhythm that works for you. We all know that if we feel like we are in a creative hiatus, then things are not flowing as we might like them to. The same is true here. So if you just post and do nothing else, it’s possible that nothing else will happen. So it’s like everything else — getting into a regular and consistent rhythm.

And then — and I really want to say this really clearly — your biography, which you only get 150 characters for on Instagram, is so important. I would love it if it said really clearly who you are, what you do, what do you stand for, why are you doing this work, what do you love about it. How can you share concisely? How can you précis your soul, which essentially is what you’re doing? And I think it’s really important, and I also think it’s a wonderful exercise to get into as an artist, so that you can dig deeply into your soul and really feel what it is, who you are, and how you want to express that in the world.