✨ 2024 NON-GENERIC Guide To Social Media For Artists

Table of Contents

April 6, 2024

I’m gonna be brief: Are you looking for authentic observations on social media for artists? You’re in the right place.

In this article, I’ve gathered non-generic, observation-based insights on how Instagram and other social media platforms are going to be like in 2024 from an artist’s perspective.

Inside:

Social media marketing & art business,
Best social media for creatives in 2024,
2024 social media strategy for your Instagram account.

Sounds good? Then just keep reading!

How to read this article?

This article consists of 6 trends. There’s a summary of each at the beginning of the paragraphs below in a grey box. If you want a deeper insight, read the summary AND the full explanation below.

WHERE DID I TAKE THE SOCIAL MEDIA 2024 ART PREDICTIONS FROM?

A few months ago, in the August issue of my art & culture newsletter for artists, I shared with you an interesting talk of two artists, @vonnart & @inkwell_illustrations. Each has a global audience, an established social media presence, and has been in the “business” for years now, watching how Instagram and other platforms’ algorithms have been changing over the years.

In the talk, they shared a few observations on how social media platforms are working now, how they functioned in the past, what type of art content to create to reach a wider audience, etc.

Recently, I thought to myself: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if an artist could know what Instagram and other platforms are going to look like in 2024?” I revisited the video, and took down the key observations as quotes below. So, that’s the main information source of this article; but not the only one – I’m interlacing the insights from the video with my own personal thoughts.

Since both vonnart and Inkwell have been successfully using these platforms for years now, I believe their insider insight is especially valuable. However, there’s one thing we must remember: the discussion took place in July 2023, so there are many things that might have changed ever since.

And, of course, I do encourage you to watch the entire video: The Downfall of Social Media in 2023 for ARTISTS ft. @vonnart

Post your art on Twitter and TikTok for the biggest growth.

The easiest platforms to grow on? For static images – Twitter, for short-form video – TikTok.

I know, weird take. I almost think that Twitter – even though it’s on fire- is still the easiest platform to grow on.
Right now, I think, as a static image artist, I would still agree with you on that – right now. We’ll see how Threads perform in the coming months, but I think if you’re willing to do a short-form video, I would argue TikTok’s probably the best way to get discovered quickly.

MY TAKE: Quite the contrary, I think Twitter/X has been the most difficult platform for me. 😅 (Maybe I’m just doing something wrong here).

On the other hand, I’m much more attracted to Threads. Maybe that’s because it’s all so new and fresh there, and it’s easier to get things going there once you have an established audience on Instagram? Whatever it is, it leads us to point 2:

Threads might become the next go-to social media platform for artists.

If that’s okay with you, create a Threads social media account. The platform is new, and there’s a lot of upcoming features we’ll see rolling out in 2024. Join this social media channel before it gets oversaturated.

Threads, called by many a “Twitter killer” might shake up the social media landscape in 2024. It’s something fresh (super-fresh in the UE), so everyone’s hanging out there to see what it’s like… at least for now. As I mentioned above, I treat it as a more promising X alternative for those who were late to the Twitter party and didn’t really have a chance to build their presence on the platform in its early days.

In their official Threads announcement post, Meta promises a number of new features to be launched, the key one probably being the ActivityPub protocol integration (to make the platform more decentralized and relevant to new generations of creators):

In addition to working toward making Threads compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, soon we’ll be adding a number of new features to help you continue to discover threads and creators you’re interested in, including improved recommendations in feed and a more robust search function that makes it easier to follow topics and trends in real time.

We must face up to the fact it’s endlessly harder to be successful on Instagram than it was a few years ago.

We’re in a transition phase, still waiting to see which social network is going to take off next.
Both beginner art enthusiasts and professional artists are struggling to make it on social media right now, especially Instagram, due to algorithms’ changes.

…the way Instagram has changed just in the last two, two and a half years where I can’t rely on it like I once could. And I think artists need to realize, even for people with big followings […] most artists right now are actually losing followers. But I would say for most of the art friends that we even have, social media is definitely not the platform it was three years ago.

The Instagram problem touches both mature and beginner artists:

All of us have been hurting in some way. So it’s not just beginner artists. It’s not just getting into the field. We’re all feeling it. So don’t take it personal. Don’t think that it’s the end of the world if you’re not getting a lot of feedback or results from social media because we’ve all been feeling very weird about social media, specifically Instagram, which was once agreed upon that that was the platform where everyone went and everyone posted to see growth. Right now, we’re in kind of this weird transition phase where no one knows what the next stage looks like, but we’re all feeling the growing pain of being in that in-between phase. Is Threads gonna be the next one? Is Hive? Is Blue Sky? Is Twitter gonna be the thing that takes off? We don’t know right now, but we can definitely feel Instagram halting pretty hard, and that affected all of us across the board.

If you want to monetize your art and drive sales from social media, it is much harder right now (and probably is still going to be in 2024).

It’s 3x harder for independent artists to make money on their art through social media right now than it was, for example, two years ago.
Two “stable” social media platforms for art content & monetization are YouTube and Patreon.

I have a question for you because I know you use social media a lot for pushing Etsy sales. How has that affected you with Instagram not performing as well as it did even a year ago?
So, I think a year ago, I had a very specific goal. It was like a year and a half ago at this point [as of July 2023 ]. I had a very specific goal on what I wanted Etsy to do for me per month, and essentially, I wanted it to cover all my expenses, like my living cost. I’ll just say the goal was 6K a month. I had been working towards that for a long time, and we managed to hit it. But Instagram was performing really well. Like, anytime I would do a new post, I’d instantly have, you know, two, three Ks sitting in my account if I did a sale. So, that’s half my goal for the month, and then the rest would just trickle in slowly. And those were really good numbers. I was very happy with that. That conversion rate was, you know, I was very proud of it. And then those posts on Instagram started doing way worse. If they would even reach anybody, I would get, like, maybe a couple hundred dollars in sales from that thing, which still isn’t nothing, but it’s nowhere near what it was. Yeah, so it slowly declined, and it was specifically from the decline of Instagram I noticed because, like, my stats on, like, what Etsy is bringing me hasn’t really changed, but my stats on the external sales that are coming from other websites has changed, AKA Instagram, Twitter, and the other ones. And on a good month, I’m doing about 2K a month, so within a year and a half, a third of what I was doing, like, regularly.
And the only things that have really come through for me in the last year for sure has been Patreon, and that’s been very consistent, and YouTube’s been extremely consistent. And even us doing this YouTube interview right now, like obviously we’re playing into that right now because I think we both see relevance and importance in it as a long game solution.

The best way to be seen on social media is to have art that is confident and/or relatable.

To make your art social media posts successful, they should be:

confident (brush-stroke heavy),
relatable (having a little story inside)
simple,
happy,
colorful (saturated colors, five o’clock lighting),
appealing to a general audience.

So here’s my theory: I think the best way to get seen on social media, how to be seen in 2023 right now, is to have art that is confident and/or relatable. And if you can have both, then you’re hitting a home run.
I have a folder saved on Instagram, I call it ‘one-offs,’ where on my Discover page, I’ll discover images that have a crazy amount of like ratio, usually higher than their actual following counts. So if it has, like, 35,000 likes, they might only have, like, 12,000 followers, which is crazy to get more likes than you do followers a lot of the time.
And I noticed a lot of these images are just very simple, very happy, very bold, and the way that they paint it, it’s very confident, like a very brush stroke-heavy. And then it’s something usually relatable, like, ‘Oh, you know, five o’clock morning, walking the dog.’ It’ll just be something that anyone could relate to. So it’s almost the opposite of what it was like a couple of years ago.
I would say before when hashtags worked, you could insert yourself into a niche audience really easily and be seen, especially if you were doing something that a lot of people weren’t doing. You instantly were a member of that community.
But now, with that not being as effective, like, you really have to play into general audiences. If the majority of the public isn’t interested in your work, it’s going to be hard for it to get that initial like ratio that Instagram wants to then push it, or you know, Twitter wants or whatever. Or at least that’s what it seems like. So the more generalized your work is in a way or the more relatable or the more consumable to the masses, the better chance it has in succeeding. So, somebody like me, who does kind of niche work and kind of grew off of that, is now going to struggle. So I have to change it up, right? Or at least that’s what it seems like in theory.

Advice to a young artist

My advice to a young artist, if you’re listening to us right now, if you want to see growth on platforms, I would say do pieces that are very colorful, very relatable. Try to play with that five o’clock lighting, play with a lot of very saturated colors. And have it be a little simple story. It could be like a little kid playing at a pond and finding a frog or something. Like if you go to a very human core on what elements you’re trying to express in your artwork, rather than something really gaudy, decadent, bizarre.
But I don’t think you should alter your own voice to fit the parameters of what’s popular currently because everything is a pendulum, and I feel like eventually, I think we’ll see people push again towards niche art.

In the AI era, what you need to stand out is authenticity & a strong brand.

With so much AI art out there, you need to show you’re real (tell the audience about yourself) and have a strong brand (a set of unique traits).

AI art was a huuuge (controversial) topic in 2023 within the art community. According to statistics, 74% of artists believe AI artwork to be unethical, and 55% of artists worry that AI art will hinder their ability to generate income using their own art. Yet, despite the negative emotions, artificial intelligence is becoming a part of our everyday life, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

And, of course, it applies to visual content, too. The threshold to creating art has lowered down significantly, and we’ve been flooded by AI-generated artworks.

There’s much more digital art than compared to just a few months ago. So, how do you stand out in this ocean of art?

In my opinion, you need authenticity and branding (not that you didn’t need them before; DEFINITELY NOT. You just need them even more nowadays).

Authenticity

In a world full of artificially-made content, authenticity is the new currency. Prove to your target audience there’s some real soul in your art. I think in 2024, your art must tell a story, as well as be be “witty” and well-thought-out; that’s the added value now.

You can probably no longer compete with AI when it comes to some art styles ((from what I see, mostly either realistic, or pretty-anime-game-girl- like). And if you can’t beat if with your supreme technical painting skill, you need to do it some other way.

Branding

Branding is the process of creating a unique and consistent identity to differentiate yourself from the competition and establish a strong emotional connection with your audience.

With so many artworks surrounding you, a big deal of them generated by AI, you need to niche down, and have some specific traits specific to you.

Of course, you can still incorporate the Instagram given by vonnart above, but you can combine them with your style to create something more unique.

EXAMPLE: Let’s take my social media presence as an example (not that I’m a branding guru, but I’m doing my best 😅. On my Instagram account, I post solely finished illustrations (no doodles, photos, etc.). My illustrations depict urban/small town landscapes or scenes, usually with a person or few to add a little bit more story to them. Generally, I stick to dust, dawn, or the golden hour in terms of lighting and colors. I’m trying to convey the “lo-fi”, “nostalgia”, “melancholy” vibe. Finally, in 2024, I want to dive deep into animation to create short, looped videos to better get the message across.