Is your social net working? We connect by networking and finding opportunities to grow our social net.

Are your connections helping you? Here are comments, feedback from the creatives… Most people like Artists and other professionals like to think that Social Marketing is a fad, or it’s too time consuming, they all have merits and need to be considered.

However,r every person has a Social Net – whether it’s in a forum, a discussion group your friends on and off line, places that you can go for help, your co-operative or Business Association. Your Social Net, is wherever you go to be social, to use the tools that are made available to all of us.

Has anyone got a program for people like me can follow to get some beginning results and become encouraged about doing more? I am trying to get “into” social media to advance my art career but it’s very confusing and seemingly huge.

For those in the know here’s a question for you:

How would you go about using social media to develop gallery representation?

The paradox for many artists is that they desire intensely to communicate and be understood but find the expression of this need through their work and not through more active, fluid and immediate channels such as live communication. 

Perhaps the answer is that with indirect media such as this one, or blogging, or other social media, the artist has much-needed time to reflect, to write and edit, to experiment with one idea then change it — without the pressing need to be socially “interesting,” with all the pressure that entails.

For people for whom communication is MOST important (ie., artists), social chitter-chatter can be incredibly demanding and demoralizing simply because one can’t get the whole idea across, or because one’s conversational counterparts are unable or uninterested in investing the deep attention required to really understand the other.

What if there were a social media in which texting-level word babble were not permitted, and only those media capable of complex and subtle thought such as music, images and poetry were allowed? Would we end up talking to the choir or would we find a new level of interchange? 

Come to think of it, maybe we already have this: concerts, recitals, museums, art auctions, poetry readings, fine publishing…yet if this were enough of a solution why are there so many artists feeling frustrated at not finding a market for exchange? Eric Olson

The last 6 years I’ve used some form of social networking. It’s increase traffic to our web to over 1 million visitors a year. Now we’re working on our “Tribe” Love to talk more with you about it. After all my mission is to bridge the gap between art and commerce. Scott Hull

I use social networking like Twitter and Facebook to promote my blog posts and etsy site. I think it helps bring people to my shows and to look at my blog but it has not helped with sales a whole lot. I am still plugging away at hoping people will buy a few photo prints on my site. Kerry Ann Hawkins

I am truly devoted fan of social media networking.
 But – as Sue Martin correctly comments – I am also a person who easily makes new friends, who loves to socialize, spend time with people all over the world, work on art project with others – and so on. For me – the social media networking  and growing my social net just makes it even easier to connect, and stay connected, with people. It makes me feel that I belong to a larger society of artists. It makes our planet smaller in a way. I really like that. The main thing about successful networking, though, is to always remember this:

The question should never be “What can you do for me? – but always “What can I do to help you?”

Do not expect people to help you, but be very grateful if they do.
 Your network is a Small World it’s based on this concept of:  How can we help each other?

Recently someone posted information about an up-coming art project that they were doing in San Francisco. Immediately I got constructive and good response with suggestions to whom I could contact. Some days later I even got a mail from an investor who is a partner of one of the largest independent galleries in the Bay Area, asking if we wanted to have the exhibition there. Amazing!

However – I know that promoting something that is not your by heart is much easier than promoting yourself. Promoting my own art feels like holding my heart in my hands, hoping that someone won´t step on it. It was less scary to be in charge of a budget of several 100 millions than opening an exhibition. But the good thing about having this experience is that I know that I just have to do it! I have to be out there – I have to talk about my art – I have to visit galleries – and so on.

But I also have to find a way of doing it that is in accordance with who I am. And in that sense social media networking is perfect. I can connect to a lot of people in an easy way. I make valuable connections that are fun and rewarding.

I thank the artists of the LinkedIn group “Art Marketing.” If you like articles like this subscribe to the blog..  You may even like this article