Digital Technologies for Creative Students

Another great way to utilise social media is to grow an online audience for your creative work. Platforms offer a direct method of communication between creators and audiences without having to get your work commissioned by a mainstream publisher, but growing an audience can be daunting and exhausting. Below are some tested methods to organically grow a strong and responsive audience on your chosen platform.

HOW TO USE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS PROFESSIONALLY

One of the first, and most important things you need to do if planning to use your social media to promote your talents, is to be very clear about keeping your content professional. Audiences can be easily confused and put off by a seemingly random collection of content on your profile, so if you are looking to show off your skills, keep your personal content to a separate feed.

Create a clear brand for your profile

Use prominent colours, logos and typography to make your content look recognisable. These elements can be achieved using a range of free apps on either on computer or mobile. One great free option for quick and clean looking social content is CANVA

Using colour can be a really simple way to be instantly more recognisable in the busy social media space. Focus on visual content that has repeated highlight colours or a colour tone. You could focus on bright colours, blues and greens, natural tones, greys and black etc.

The colours you use should link in some way to the tone of your content.

Consistency is key

By maintaining consistency in your content, you are able to establish a reliable relationship with your followers as you grow your audience. Consistency is also rewarded by the social media algorithms, with regular posts often getting more prominent placement on people's content feeds.

Keep personal content separate

By keeping your creative profiles limited to only that content, you create a consistent image for your followers to engage with whilst also limiting the risks of mixing personal content.

Research shows a number of devastating instances whereby creatives and business professionals have lost their entire social media presence as a result of being flagged or removed for sharing personal content that the system has deemed unsuitable. In lots of cases it is then incredibly difficult to get these accounts back.

HOW TO GROW AN ACCOUNT ORGANICALLY

Starting a new professional account on any social platform is a daunting prospect, trying to promote your work with no audience and competing against accounts with huge followings, but every single account has at one point had to start in the same place which means you can also grow your following and reach lots of people with your talents.

There are a number of ways to gain followers across all social media platforms. Some accounts will pay for followers, some will just follow other people in the hope of it being reciprocated, but the most effective way I have found to consistently and reliably grow an account is through AUTHENTIC INTERACTIONS

In order to get real world benefits from growing an online community, the most valuable aim is to foster a loyal audience as opposed to a large one. An audience of 1000 engaged and loyal followers is more than sufficient to sustain a business or help promote creative endeavours, so focusing on engaging with like minded and interested followers is an incredibly useful approach.

As part of this research project I have developed a tested way to build this type of audience without any financial input or following any other accounts. Following these simple steps consistently, you will be able to grow a healthy and loyal following for your content to share your creative work:

Upload an initial selection of your content to your account with a clear focus on your specialism
Make sure your account bio is clear in what you do
Find trends / hashtags that link to your chosen field of expertise and follow them
Explore accounts that have contributed to these trends and engage with their content
Like, comment and share content that is similar to your own work
BE AUTHENTIC - social media is intended at face value to allow for real world interactions to take place online, so just be honest.
Post regularly. This doesn't have to be every day, but the more quality content you can share of your work, the more chance people have to interact with it. Each social platform will take note of how much activity your content gets and this directly influences how many people it will be shown to, so regular content with good engagement will lead to further post reach (getting seen by more new people)
Maintain your relationships with your audience. Respond to comments, pay attention to what they are doing regularly and interact with people. Loyalty is built from genuine connections and these can only be built from authentic interactions.

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