hello vicious welcome back to my channel I hope you all had a happy holiday and now that it is the new year maybe you have some new art goals or business goals for your business that is somewhat in relation to Art and hopefully in today's video we can you know have a tool to help you get your art goals moving forward and I know this topic is a little bit frustrating to some artists and yes it's about social media but for those of you who do want to use social media as a tool to expedite
your art goals in a somewhat business way then maybe stay tuned and keep watching this video so when you hear the word likes and Views it sounds all very superficial when you first hear about it it might make some people cringe including myself but it is the fact that this is just what our society is right now and I don't know if it's going to change anytime soon and the way that you can get any discoverability or exposure to Opportunities when it comes to social media nowadays is usually when you're able to draw in bigger
numbers so that other companies or potential collaborators can see you or find you and although numbers tend to be superficial it's usually not always the case because there are actually a lot of artists out there that need these numbers in order to keep their businesses running and a lot of artists also might want to experiment with the idea of potentially leaving their Studio Job one day and wanting to start their own thing but they don't know how that's going to be possible without a community or an audience to begin with so there is some reasoning
behind why you should be growing likes views on your posts or artwork because it helps you get a gauge of what is doing well and what isn't so I'm going to be focusing more on the platform of Instagram am today because I feel like Instagram usually is a more General hub for a lot of artists to share their work and from there they can Branch off to you know their Etsy Shop their YouTube channel their other websites that exist but Instagram is kind of the main profile that people will mainly interact with I'm gonna be
mainly focusing on the comics and animation realm because that is my personal specialty on my Instagram at new triple that's where I pretty much share all of my personal Comics as well as some of my career updates storyboarding slash animation life and also my journey in publishing a book so normally people would think that if you're just generally good at what you do you should just naturally be able to bring in an audience well that's not always the case because there are a lot of amazing professional artists you know like they're Disney veterans there are
people from major Studios major gaming Studios that are sharing their work online but they still do not have the type of audience or community in terms of numbers that you would expect them to have like the correlation between skill level and audience size is not always going to be directly positive so just know that whenever you do see art profiles or art accounts with you know a lot of views and a lot of likes that doesn't always mean that their skill level is going to be what is objectively the best out there normally there are
other tactics that kind of go into why this person was able to be successful on social media specifically I'm just going to be talking about what I've observed from my experience as an artist just sharing my work what has worked for me that has helped me gain views likes which thus later on led to followers but do know that this correlation is not always direct either so I'm just focusing again on likes and Views and maybe engagement for this video so one of my first observations is that Comics almost always do better than stand-alone illustrations
the only time I do find Standalone illustrations doing really well is if you are somebody who is already really big on social media and a lot of people know you for your artwork through other sources or if Instagram was where you mainly shared your work that's where people kind of expect this type of art from you but when it comes to just like again average artists I do tend to see that people have a preference towards comics and that those types of posts usually get more likes comments and views on the posts themselves some of
the reasons why I find this to be the case because usually Comics are again based on stories and thus that leads to the room for discussion people to comment in the comments below and usually when there are topics that are relatable to others people are more likely to engage and share it with others people might either DM you or they might even re-share your post on their story and share it to friends and that eventually leads to more people coming to your comic because you said something that somebody else out there has always been thinking
about in their head but they didn't know how to say it or express it and you pretty much said it for them and it's easy for them to just share it on their stories send it to a friend so that that person or Their audience knows what they mean so they then kind of lead a direct link to you and people then come to your page in your post and that's why I personally feel like Comics have a bigger reach just even from being a very simple do doodle but we'll discuss that aspect later other
reasons why I Feel Like Comics might do better for maybe artists in particular is because when you have multiple panels in a comic you have multiple opportunities to Showcase different types of cartoons or artwork that Express different things sometimes you know your first page might not have been your best but maybe panel five is where you have that super cool drawing that somebody just really likes and for that reason they're more likely to either like or engage with your post as well because what I notice with my Comics is usually whenever I make comic they
might be like ooh panel four or five hit me the most or be like oh my gosh I love that drawing on panel six so by creating a comic with multiple panels you're giving yourself more of an opportunity for people to like something about your work or something for them to engage with another thing I noticed that makes certain posts do well as especially when it comes to the world of comics on Instagram is that usually the first panel is more appealing than the others or it's more of the attention grabber panel so I know
it's a tale as old as time when you're just trying to manipulate people into reading your whole comic or trying to consume your whole artwork but that's just the way that marketing has always been throughout time it's kind of like a movie poster the way they advertise it is through sharing different types of movie posters through Billboards or advertisements or sometimes even when you're just walking around a bookstore you still judge a book by its cover as much as we tell people not to do it they're still gonna do it so it kind of depends
on you if you want to you know attract someone to your post more if you have the option to do that or not if you feel like the sacrifice is worth it for your post so usually what I tend to do with the front first page of my Comics is is I either just always have a character's face in it frontal facing preferably because I notice if it's the back of the head or a side view people don't really engage with it as much and during one of my character art internships I did learn in
one of the meetings that people prefer to have a character facing you because that subconsciously engages with the person immediately and sure that sounds really manipulative but I guess it works and a lot of people on social media again are going to be attracted to somewhat superficial things I know it sucks but I just feel like I need to do what I need to do in order to have the chance of gaining some sort of success with this thing I worked so hard on so if it just means having a frontal face on the first
page of the comic sure I'll do it and then next another thing I notice is if you have something kind of shocking on the front page so something that's kind of like ooh a bad test score or somebody just saying something shocking that usually kind of makes the audience wonder what is this about like oh my God what and then they'll want to read more because they've been intrigued or another thing is the front page maybe makes them wonder about something you have something on the front page that will make people or audience members wonder
what this comic is about and why it started off this way so those are ways that usually attract people to engaging with your post a little bit more are staying on your post a little bit more and then they'll have different thoughts and emotions occur in their brain that will either make them share it with others or comment on your post because they have something to say about it too so again that's why I Feel Like Comics have a little bit more of a chance to gain more views and likes just because you have topics
you can discuss that can make people think things but also just so you know through my experience whenever I shared comics where the front page was not appealing like maybe it was the front of someone's face but her eyes are closed or maybe if it's like a background of a scene but there's no close-ups of anyone's face I noticed that those types of first panels don't really do as well because somebody scrolling through their feed might just think oh it's just a background drawing but I don't really care about a background like what do I
have to care about a background for like you kind of have to make the people care in a way and again I know it sounds really manipulative but already in animation that's what you're doing you're manipulating people's emotions in film and stories whenever I try to make a comic I try to make the first page engaging and not something that somebody can easily pass by and not give a about so the next thing that I noticed from my experience with creating comics on Instagram is that a lot of comic artists work only really do well
when they're fully line arted and flat colored you don't need to have amazing fully painted colors but if you at least just block in the basic colors needed to communicate your story clearly that's fine enough to do well so I've experimented before with doing more sketchy or doodly Comics but I felt like those Comics they actually did really well when I sold them in the form of books but compared to my fully colored Comics they just you know did not do as well so I feel like like these doodly types of comics will only do
well if you are already an artist like Sarah Anderson who already creates these doodle comics and they're very simple and it's straight to the comedic point but if that's not your voice that's not your style I don't think it's gonna work for you especially if people kind of knew you for something else already so for me personally a lot of people kind of know me for just my mixture of Western and Asian Styles so it's just a way that people already associate you with your art so when people see my art they kind of expect
something that's you know either wholesome or something that's like slightly funny but like also somewhat mature and then sometimes I do talk about adult topics as well so usually when it comes to my Comics people don't expect like silly like slapstick humor stuff really and you kind of have to make compromises with your audience when it comes to that sort of stuff where yeah you're gonna have to keep making certain types of comics that are a mixture of what your audience likes and what you like but sometimes you're gonna have your experimental moments that might
not always resonate with your audience and if it doesn't do well well you have to be a little bit understanding of it because the people who are following you maybe just didn't expect that from you or it's just not something they're used to so if you did want to make a full-on transition to another style it would just probably take a lot of time to fully transition your audience but from what I notice again usually the safest bet is to go for fully line arted and fully colored comics and again by fully colored I just
mean like at least flat colored also just another thing about that though that I find really frustrating is I noticed that a lot of sketchy or doodly Comics might also just not do well because I feel like people who are not artists when they see these types of comics in their heads that doesn't compute as good art maybe it might be bad or even like unfinished to them but usually when you have artists who are also your followers they'll understand the intent a little bit more but when you're trying to appeal to a larger audience
which again equals probably more likes more comments more views they might not really get it as easily as other artists so that's just another frustrating fact about that so when I talked about the fact that Comics usually do well because you bring the opportunity to discuss certain topics there are certain topics that will do better than others and the ones that I noticed from my personal experience and yes I actually went into the analytics of all of my posts and I went through what did the best and what didn't do the best and usually it
regarded the topic of the post like the art style the art skill level for all of these Comics are relatively similar but something about the topics are really what separated these different Comics apart when it came to the type of Engagement likes and Views it got so the ones that did the best from my personal experience are societal issues being a female presenting person dealing with mental health relationship Moments Funny relatable Comics touching or emotional comics and childhood memories so the reasons why I feel like these obviously do the best is because this reaches a
more Universal audience and usually what I notice is that more specific experiences like the time my boyfriend and I traveled to Peru and we went to Machu Picchu that's not an experience that everybody might have like sure it did really great with my audience members in Peru which hello but do you know what with everyone not everybody went to Machu Picchu in Peru it's not something that everybody has experienced but when you talk about things like not doing well on a test in school and that moment just makes you feel like a failure for the
rest of your life even though that thing won't even matter anymore that's something that I feel like everybody has struggled with as a kid and that is one of the reasons why a lot of people are the way they are today so things like that resonate with people and the broader it is the more likely it's gonna probably reach somebody else out there the only way you can specify it is through shaping it in your own story from your own life but the topic is still about something more Broad and Universal some of the comic
artists who I feel like approach these topics really well are Blobby and friends who talks a lot about societal issues and what's up beanie who has a lot of very funny and relatable and also wholesome Comics another thing that I notice when it comes to Comics is that usually overly cinematic or overly abs extract things might not do as well because again you kind of isolate certain people who don't understand it and they might you know just not really understand what is going on in the comic because they don't have this certain artistic taste because
let's remember not everybody who looks at your art is going to be an artist those are things that might usually do better when it's on a screen because when you have animation and more than just one picture to represent it you have many frames to represent it you can communicate the idea a little bit better but let's remember on Instagram you only got 10 panels to work with so I feel like cinematic types of panels might only really do better if you're publishing a full-on graphic novel with a lot of different panels that could support
it but when it comes to like these short bite-sized Comics that people just read on social media they don't really care for these cinematic or artistic decisions unfortunately I will say with my Comics I found a way to kind of compromise between the two where I still have a lot of my panels just be more direct straight to the point not any extreme camera moves but I still will include extreme angles different types of shots as long as it supports what the comic is trying to get at emotionally you kind of have to compress it
into something a little bit simpler to understand because again people on social media are only here to read your thing for like less than one minute and then they're gonna pass by it but if you do want people to engage and like your work you're gonna have to make it a little bit clearer for them to understand within a short amount of time so then next I feel like people might be wondering then does the aesthetic of your overall profile matter then because a lot of people I notice especially artists try to make their whole
feed look cohesive and nice and you you would think that as artists we would care about that but from my personal experience people generally just won't even care for your work if your individual posts themselves are not engaging so if you do want people to be coming back to your profile or your page more and reading more of your Comics or looking at more of your art you do have to focus more on the posts themselves and not just how they look like overall on your profile let me just tell you when my profile was
at its most cohesive State when I was doing the doodle comics and that seems like more appealing from a more minimalistic standpoint it still didn't do well because I feel like people just look at this and they immediately can tell that they do not want to follow you or engage with your work anymore because you gave them a very clear decision as to why they do or they don't want to follow you they're like hey I don't really like black and white Comics I don't really like this style I'm not into and that's fine people
are allowed to like and not like what they want to but when you do have a mishmash of things on your profile it's kind of like you're tricking the audience and you're kind of like being like Oh you know the individual posts look good but you don't really know what my whole profile is about so it leads people to kind of have to click on individual posts of yours to see okay what is this person's profile about then because you don't have the whole overall profile aesthetic to tell them really what it is like sure
they could tell you're an artist sure you could draw well but I still don't know what this profile exactly entails then they click on your post and then they read your comic and then they see that they like what they just read and then they're probably gonna read more and then end up engaging with your post liking it sending it to people following you at the end of the day so I feel like from my experience whenever I had a profile grid of mixed type types of things where it's like Comics here individual drawing here
a little real here a real photo of myself here people are kind of like getting a general broad overview of generally who I am but they still don't know who I am because I did not make a profile grid to Define that for me so I personally don't think the whole profile aesthetic thing works and I would again focus more on the quality of the individual posts themselves so yeah from my personal experience these are just my observations I noticed as an artist who has just posted my comics for the past four years now and
once again likes comments and engagement don't always equal more followers because the people who are liking and engaging with your work are most likely pre-existing followers but the thing is is that when there is more engagement on this certain post you make it can lead to more followers because Instagram will be pushing this to more people if they see that enough of people on your page are already liking this but my coffee out with that is to just know that just because your post did not do well with your own audience doesn't mean that your
post is bad it doesn't mean that your art is bad it's just the strategy or you know the algorithm that day or in general just was not good because there are again plenty of artists that I feel create amazing artwork and they share their Art online but they don't always get the proper type of reciprocation so I hope that maybe by discussing some ways that you can improve your social media strategy to come and view your work and give them the chance to decide if they like it or not that can you know help you
develop an audience overall on your Instagram profile or Channel or whatever you want to call it anyway thanks for watching this video if you're somebody who is interested in growing your social media and you know just developing your own brand or a business with your artwork out there I wish you the best of luck and I hope that maybe some of these tips helped you out because I feel like these are less obvious tips and tricks because when you're online there's so many pieces of advice that just generally tell you how you can grow followers
and grow this and that but when it comes to artists like what types of decisions can you actually make within your artwork that can help you gain more views and likes and then maybe more followers from that so yeah good luck with everything and I hope all goes well with your year and I will see you all in the next one so peace out and stay whose ambitious [Music]
