Instagram is changing, prioritizing video over photos. Is Instagram over for artists who rely on the platform to promote their artwork?
- Watch the 31 second short
- Watch the 40 min. version
With social media changes, it can be really challenging for artists to know what to do.
Do you seek out other social media platforms to promote your work? Do you try to translate your photos into video content? Discussion led by Art Prof Clara Lieu and Teaching Artists Deepti Menon and Cat Huang.
Video Walkthrough
- Adam Mosseri’s announcement about Instagram changes in 2021
- Get info on the algorithm, but don’t obsess over it!
- Social media is a ton of work, is it really important to you right now?
- Don’t hop on every new platform, explore it first to get more info
- Experimenting with social media posts is necessary to improve
- Creating videos can be hard, but it’s not as hard as you think!
- You can create videos with just stills, it doesn’t have to be all video footage’
- Videos on social media are ideally 15 seconds
- You have 1 second to hook people to continue watching a video
- Genuine, audience engagement will trump any algorithm strategies
- The quality of your audience matters much more than numbers
- Social media will always change, so learn how to adapt with it
- Follow main accounts of the social media platforms to get updates
- Analyze your own behavior when you look at social media
- You’ll have posts that fail and don’t get any attention, that’s normal
- Look at accounts by artists you follow and analyze how they format their posts.
- It’s always okay to take a break from social media and/or your art
Prof Lieu’s Tips
Engagement with your followers can be very effective. What I find is better is to give your followers concrete options that they can choose: do you like the version with red or blue better?
If you ask for suggestions, or vague questions like to “what do you think?” that requires too much thinking and people won’t engage. When it’s a poll, or a yes/no question, it’s really easy for people to pick 1 without thinking too hard.
I can tell you then I cannot resist a poll, I always participate when I see one!
