With Facebook set to hit 500 million members this July, you can’t afford to not be on Facebook at this point. I’ve written about Facebook a lot over the past few months, but I can’t keep away from writing about it more. Picture this little scenario:
Johnny is a 35 year old professional, a young executive-in-training. He’s smart, good looking, and has a little extra money to burn. He has a nice home and he wants to start making it a little more sophisticated by adding some original art. He likes collage art, so he starts doing searches inside of Facebook for collage artists. His initial results give him a couple of artists and he notices that people that he’s friends with already Like those pages.
When he clicks through to the page, he lands on a gallery showing this artist’s work. It’s fresh and inspiring, so he clicks that Like button, and now he’s a fan. He visits the wall, the information page, and goes back to the gallery. He sees a piece that he really likes and notices that there is a little ‘Buy Now’ button next to the collage. He clicks the button and it takes him to a shopping cart. He buys it and then it returns him to the artist’s gallery.
Sell Your Art On Facebook
The scenario that I just described is already happening in very small numbers. It’s also not the only way that Facebook can help you sell your work. In addition to this scenario, you could also make your art appear on people’s pages using Facebook Ads. You can give people the opportunity to share your work with their Facebook friends using the Facebook Like Button. The possibilities, you see, are becoming endless.
There are the basics of selling art on Facebook. You should have a Fan page, be uploading your work to an image gallery, create events based around your new work and showings, favorite other pages, share comments and discuss things with your fans. Those are the ground level things that everyone should already know how to do.
Then there are the advanced techniques. John Kraft went on record to say that Facebook is his favorite method of advertising his art. Here are some ways to get started with some more advanced marketing on Facebook.
Facebook Ads. You know those little ads that appear on the right column on your Facebook page? You know that those ads can be targeted according to people’s interests, biographical data, and user behavior? So, for example, if you were a painter of pets, you could target an ad at people between the ages of 35 – 60, with college degrees, who like dogs and cats. Then, in the ad, show them pictures of your work. What could possibly be more enticing than that? Plus, the ads are cheap. Generally around $.50 – $.80 per click.
The Like Button and Facebook Metadata. Last month I wrote a post about the new Facebook Like button. I said that Facebook was quietly taking over the Internet, and I was right. Now sites like Yelp, CNN, and hundreds of other big websites are leveraging the Like button to share their information with potential cusotmers. The thing about this is that it takes almost zero effort and no cost. If you are running WordPress there are a plethora of plugins that will implement the Like button for you.
If you are smart, you’ll also have your website set up to display your art in a gallery that gives each piece it’s own page. If you’ve done this, then you can turn your artwork into an army of likable objects that do a ton of marketing for you. Example: since installing the Like button on this site, I’ve received an average of 5 – 10 Likes per blog post. Multiply that by the fact that each person has an average of 120 friends, and over the course of two months of three posts per week that’s 1800 – 3600 sets of eyes who saw my stuff without me doing any extra work.
Facebook SEO. Yesterday Justin Kistner wrote a very interesting blog post about the fact that soon Facebook will be giving Google a run for its money in the search game. Just like in the opening story, more and more people will start to search Facebook for the things that they want.
If you learn Facebook SEO (which basically comes down to naming your page right and getting people to Like you), you can dominate searches right now and get ahead of the game.
There’s tons of opportunity in Facebook for artists right now. How are you taking advantage? Check out the How to Sell Art Online Facebook page and let me know!
[...] Buddhist, Hindu, math loving people hang out online? Well, you can probably find them on Facebook and sell your art there. Besides Facebook, you could find blogs and other websites that write about these topics [...]