When I first heard the words “social media,” I had 3 years of the smARTist Telesummit under my belt, had sold thousands of copies of my Writing The Artist Statement book, and coached dozens of private artist clients.

I barely had time to brush my teeth, much less prance around a “social” site with old high school classmates-who never gave me the time of day, way-back-when, in the first place.

I admit to a glop of self-righteousness:  I (oh, no, not I) wasn’t going to fall for this latest Internet hula hoop. I was going to stay focused on the business of serving artists. (See me, with my nose in the air?)

Then, marketing guru Adam Urbanski held a series of…

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There are so many missed opportunities to promote on Facebook!

I’m frequently asked by my clients to explain the ROI on social networking.  My answer is always the same: “How much time would you like to spend?”

It’s really very simple:  the more you put into it, the higher your rate of return. That’s true for anything in life, be it business or personal.

I ask my clients to spend five minutes a day on Twitter. Look through the tweets that are showing. Retweet someone else. Post a tip. Don’t be too promotional.

Next comes Facebook!

If you’ve set it up correctly, Twitter feeds directly to your status on your Facebook home page. Take another five minutes to check your status feed every day. Comment on others’ feeds. Offer tips and advice. Again, don’t be overtly promotional.

Always remember to be conversational and polite. Engage others.

Facebook can appear to be confusing and hard to follow, but once you know your way around, it’s very user friendly.

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If you want to hear more from Christine Buffaloe, she will be presenting “Beyond Beginners: Selling More Art on Facebook” on January 27th at the smARTist Telesummit 2010. Click here for all the details.

The beast’s name is TwitterFacebookYoutubeRSSFlickr.

It hides in the sites where you network, using tweets or updates, videos or photos to increase your followers/friends/hits.

These are great sites, and, if you work them, they will definitely work for you.

BUT they can easily consume a precious hour or more every day, cutting into the your studio time. That would be the beast part.

At the 2009 smARtist telesummit, networking visibility expert Nancy Marmolejo gave some fabulous tips for taming it.

Here’s one:

Feed your tweets into your Facebook page using the “Twitter” application within Facebook.

1. You’ll find Facebook applications on your home page, in the very bottom left corner.

2. Click on it and a menu pops up.

3. Pick “Browse more applications.”

4. On the next page, type “Twitter” into the search box.

5. On the results page, find the Twitter application. Make sure it’s the application by Twitter–there are some imposters.

6. Click on it. On the page that appears, click on “Go to application.”

7. Enter your Twitter username and password. [It's OK, you're giving these to Twitter. They own and run this application.]

8. Voila! All your tweets will also appear as Facebook updates.

Now that’s pretty neat. But there’s a drawback.

If you’re one of the people who tweet a lot, you’re going to have a lot of Facebook updates. Everything you tweet shows up on your Facebook page. Whether or not it makes sense. This can annoy some people so much they hide you on their Facebook page.

But there’s another nifty Facebook application that fixes this. It’s called “Selective Twitter Status.” If you use this application instead when you get to step #5 above, you can choose which tweets go to your Facebook page. When you tweet, just add #fb to the end of the ones you want to show up in Facebook.

Voila!

The beast, tamed two ways.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7 days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Here’s how to make Twitter both productive and fun:

Treat it like a cocktail party.

If you were going to a cocktail party, you wouldn’t walk in the door and start trying to sell your art to the first person you met. Unless your goals were to a) never get to know anyone interesting, b) never sell art, and c) never get invited to another cocktail party.

Instead, you’d find something you were both interested in and talk about THAT. You’d disclose something about yourself and respond to what the other person said.

That’s the way to Tweet, too.

Last time, I suggested that you look for potential buyers by using the Twitter search box to find shared interests. I used the example of searching for ‘dog owners’ if you paint pet portraits.

So the first things you’d tweet might be about what you love about your own pet. Or the best pet you ever painted. Or the funniest thing that happened to you while painting a pet.

Or what you think about painting pets. Or what you think pets think about while you’re painting them.

Then listen. Read other people’s tweets. Respond–but not with sales pitches. With cocktail party conversation.

Sales happen as a result of creating connections that are genuine and grounded in your interest in your potential collector. It’s all about the relationship first, the sale is the last sip in the glass.
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When it comes to moving your art career into the center of social media buzz, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter works like this for lots of people:

1. You sign up and start tweeting enthusiastically.

2. Your list of followers grows slllooooowwwly. You wonder how all those other people got to 3000–or 300–followers. Isn’t Twitter supposed to be social networking magic?

3. You tweet less and less frequently. Eventually, you stop altogether.

If this is you, don’t despair. At the 2009 Smartist telesummit, Joan Stewart, the social networking maven, had a great suggestion about how to find your tweeps.

Use the search box.

Let’s say you’re a painter–and you paint dog portraits. Dog owners would make great clients for you. So you type ‘dog owners’ or ‘dogs’ or even ‘I love my dog’ into the search box–and voila! You have a bunch of potential clients. Chances are, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back.

But–and here’s the key–don’t say hello with a sales pitch. Next time, we’ll talk about how to keep people reading your tweets.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter can drive people to websites. Just put a URL in your tweet and there they go.

Hypothetically.

Finding out whether or not they went is another matter.

If it’s your website you’re driving them to, you could use Google analytics to find out if your tweets bump your traffic up. (What? You don’t have Google analytics installed? It just takes pasting a little code into one of your pages and you really can’t afford to be without them. Go now. I beg you.)

But it takes 24 hours to get analytics data–and you can’t tell exactly when someone visited. So that alone won’t  help you know how effective your tweet was about your fabulous new show/sale/commission/medium/press coverage.

BudURL to the rescue. This nifty free service does two things at once:

1. It converts long URLs to short ones that take up fewer characters

2. It also tracks hits–and continuously updates them.

Post your tweet, then go back to your BudURL account page. Watch, in real time, as people hit the URL you posted.

This is pretty useful for a couple of reasons. You can…

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I confess: Twitter has totally seduced me. Without a phone booth in sight, I can switch into my Twitter cape and tights in the blink of an eye.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Back in August of ’07, like many, many others, I thought Social Media was a huge waste of time. And I found it impossible to imagine why people I highly respected, like master coach and artist Molly Gordon, MCC, and Joan Stewart, kick-ass free publicity maven (both three-time presenters on the annual smARTist Telesummit), were bothering.

Then I was drawn into a free series of teleseminars on Social Media (yup, free gets me too!) and by the end I got it: the word social was a historical reference to the beginning of the Facebook phenomenon, when college students wanted to stay connected to friends.

But like all things web-related…

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After spending the last five months figuring out this Social Media thing, getting set up on Facebook, finding an expert for smARTist Telesummit 2009, and encouraging artists to jump into this vast and ever expanding ocean, the predictably unpredictable  world of all things online has thrown me, and you, not just a curve ball, but…

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