facebook

The idea for this post comes from a cartoon from The Oatmeal.

Remember a time when Facebook was new and people were busy creating Facebook brand and business pages?

Remember how easy it was to gain followers on those pages? All those friends and fans that you refer to Facebook? All the audience that you painstakingly build up?

Remember the time when Facebook changed their policy and said that whatever you post will no longer reach all of your followers, and you have to pay money and boost your post so that your followers can then see that?

That's the sad situation we are in today.

We no longer have true access to the audience that we have brought over to Facebook, unless of course we pay for it.

But guess what, you can do something about it, and you should.

Even the Victo Ngai who has 970,000 FB followers has to think about whether to sell additional ads on her Facebook page. If you have 970,000 Youtube subscribers, you don't even have to worry about money for the rest of your life.

Build your audience outside of Facebook

There is nothing wrong with continuing to share your work on Facebook if your audience is still there. But I highly recommend that you also share your work on your own website, preferably a domain that you own. In fact, all the work that you share on your social media sites should link back to your website. Because we don't know when policy changes may happen.

This means you'll have more work to do. If you're thinking of making a career out of your art, this is something you should do. If you want to make a fulltime income from your career, be prepared to spend fulltime effort to promote your own art.

Your website can be a portfolio site or a blog. It doesn't matter. What matters is for whatever art you post, make sure to caption them in such a way that people can search for them using search engines. That is how people will be able to discover you when they search for keywords. I've received commission queries because of this strategy.

If you share your art on Facebook, your art will get pushed down when new content is added. Even if you caption your artworks, there's no way for people to search through your posts. Those posts on Facebook are update-type of posts. The posts on your own website serves two purpose though, for update and archival purposes.

So here's the main difference.

Work on your website can be discovered by strangers when they do keyword searches on Google. So you have a chance expose your art to more people, and gain more followers. Work on Facebook can only be discovered by people who are already following you, so there's no way for you to gain more followers. Facebook is not a platform that actively promotes the work of individuals, unless Facebook is paid to do that. The main way for strangers to find you on Facebook is when others share your Facebook posts.

You're posting the same work on your website and on Facebook, but since Facebook is not promoting your work, you might as well focus on posting on your website instead.

Followers subscribe to you because they want to see updates from you

That's the reason why people subscribe to pages, isn't it? To see updates from the creators or companies that they follow. But because Facebook is now limiting the reach of creators and companies, it has also broke the subscription model where you can see updates. So after subscribing to your favourite creator or companies, you still have to visit their Facebook pages separately to see what they are up to. So why subscribe to them in the first place? Seriously, how many FB pages can you remember to visit? And how much time do you have to waste to visit all those pages?

To get around this problem, creators should push their followers to subscribe to their email newsletter or RSS feed. This is so that when you publish a newsletter, you can be sure that it will reach your follower. And followers who subscribe to your RSS feed, and other RSS feed can have one place to consume all the content that they wanted to.

For example, if you want to follow all the content on Parkablogs, the best way is to follow my RSS feed. If I need to reach my followers to communicate with them directly, I can email them directly with newsletters.

This is how I would like to reach my followers. But this is not how Facebook wants you to reach your followers.

Are there other platforms that are good at promoting work?

Instagram is currently a very popular platform for artists to share their art.

One advantage of Instagram is the discovery feature. You can tag your art with hashtags and when people search for those hashtags, there can be a chance that they may see your work in the search results.

Based on my personal experience, if I were to post regularly on Instagram, I can see my followers grow consistently. You can use Social Blade to track any artist you like and see how often they post, and the followers they get on a daily basis.

But even if you post on Instagram, always remember to mention your website.

Conclusion

I don't like Facebook but that happens to be where most people are. To get your art in front of the eyes of people, you cannot avoid using Facebook. But if you want to build a more sustainable and predictable career based on your art, you should focus on creating content for your own website. And remember, push your followers to subscribe to your newsletter and RSS feed.

Are you also frustrated at Facebook and their policy? Do you have a workaround to getting your art out in front of more people? Let me know in the comments section. I'm sure there are other creators who will want this sort of valuable information.

My Youtube channel has now crossed the 9,000 subscriber mark. That's up from 7,000 since my last post about Youtube.

Today, I want to talk about using Youtube and Facebook to promoting your art videos. By art videos, I'm taking about art tutorials, demonstrations, art supply reviews, speed paintings, artist interviews and basically anything that's related to art.

Youtube and Facebook are the two biggest sites today where millions of videos are watched. Facebook viewers now watch as much as 500 million videos per day. What does that mean to you as an art creator?

Let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of posting on both platforms.

Pros and cons of posting video on Facebook

The advantage is you get views, Likes, comments, some followers.

If your video is popular enough, Facebook does promote it and give it better exposure and reach.

The disadvantage is once your content gets pushed down, it will be lost and there's no easy way to find it. You won't be able to search for it using the search box. And if it's too far in the past, people will get tired of scrolling down and give up. Unless your video has the viral factor, it's not going to be seen again after it's being pushed down.

When you're online, any content that you create should always serve to help you into the future and in this case, your Facebook content will only be useful for a few days. That's just not optimal for the effort you put into creating your video. It's like salaried job where once you stop working, you no longer get the pay cheque.

Think about how people are going to find your page. If they don't know your name or brand, there's no way they are going to do a search on Facebook to find you. If you want new followers, you have to link to your Facebook page from your website, or hope that your Facebook page gets shared by others.

Pros and cons of posting on Youtube

You will still get views, Likes, comments and some followers.

On Youtube, you have the added advantage that there's good search functionality and if your video has a good title and description, people can search for it using the search box. This means even strangers can look for content that you have posted months ago. Your content will still be useful to you and help/entertain your audience into the future. The more videos you have, the more people you can expect to be looking for them in the future.

It's easier for people to check out your other videos because you have your own channel page and playlists.

Youtube has better analytics for video. In addition to the basic demographic stats like the age group, sex, location, you also get useful information such as the watch time, like how long people are watching your video before they stop. You can use the analytics to understand what type of content is popular.

If your content is helpful and relevant to people, your video will be ranked higher and they will be showcased in the Suggested Videos sidebar where you can expect strangers to click on them. Youtube promotes other videos at the end. You have a better chance of getting a stranger finding your video, and discover that you exist.

Youtube is a better discovery platform in the sense that people can search for content they want, and not get irrelevant content pushed to them. Because of that, the type of audience you can expect on both platform are different. You won't see people who are looking for art tutorials search for them on Facebook.

Because Youtube actively promotes related video content to audience, your content if relevant, it will get promoted. That's going to earn you extra views and extra subscribers. 30% of my views are from the Suggested Videos sidebar and that's quite significant and helpful at getting new subscribers. You can build a community a subscriber base easier on Youtube than on Facebook. That's important because people who are subscribed to you won't subscribe again, whereas strangers who are on your video page may have a chance to subscribe.

Youtube is more of a balanced playing ground compared to Facebook. While I don't have any accurate statistics to back up what I say but from what I gather online from hearsay, videos uploaded on Facebook gets a preference over videos uploaded on Youtube and linked in Facebook. Youtube is Facebook's competition and it's not surprising that Facebook would limited Youtube video's exposure.

In the long run, you'll benefit from Youtube more than with Facebook because you'll have strangers discovering your content daily, unless you're really good at creating viral video content on Facebook.

Lastly, if you're in the Youtube Partner Program, you can earn money through the ads that are run above your videos. It's not going to be significant if your videos have low view counts, but in the long run it adds up.

Recently, there was a popular video called Upside Down & Inside Out by the band OK Go. They released it initially on Facebook and received 48,000,000 views and 600,000 shares. They released it one week later on Youtube and received 600,000 views and 6,000 shares (at the time of me writing this post). Ads online cost USD $1 per thousand views. So the band left $48,000 dollars on the table by uploading the video on Facebook. Of course you can argue that you may not get as much views on Youtube, but you don't know for sure if it can't get more either. Anyway, it's important not to neglect both platforms when uploading your video.

One interesting thing about OK Go's music video is, when they posted the trailer for the video on Youtube pointing to Facebook, they received avalanche of Youtube comments asking why the video is not on Youtube. That trailer has since been deleted.

As for me, I post mostly reviews and sketching tutorials so I won't be uploading my videos on Facebook because I know nobody would be searching for them there.

In the long run, you'll get a better pay-off from Youtube.