"Back in my day" (hehehe)
.....I was in college when Facebook was a growing startup company. And it was sooooo simple to start a business page and promote your business to your friends - for FREE. And they would (get this) actually be SEEN!
Now, the little startup company that connected my friends and I across dorm halls, campuses, cities, and countries has grown into a masssive corporation. Good for them. I'm sure those guys who started it are pretty proud of their work.
Buuuuut....Now it's mind-boggling complicated! There is page upon page of terms that sound like you need to be a professional marketer. In fact, "social media manager" has become a modern job listing on employment websites. But if you're just an artist who also needs to make the things you're selling (things that nobody else can make!) then you don't want to spend loads of time on this.
It's also no longer free to actually be easily seen. You have to pay up if you want more "exposure." On Meta, you can pay $12 a month to have a badge on FB and IG that says a giant corporation thinks your business is real. With this paid subscription, you can also appear "at or near" the top of search results. You are allowed the ability to add links to reels and add images to your links. Amazing!
You will also receive the promise of the elusive "enhanced support" via chat or email. (A higher-priced package says you can "get more issues resolved more quickly.") That is pretty wild, considering it's expected as a basic form of customer service from every other company we interact with.
But these social media companies don't last forever. They can also go offline at any point, taking your work with them. The recent TikTok drama is just an example of what could happen. They could also potentially go bankrupt, resulting in a sale or a total disbandment of their company/app. There are plenty of social apps and websites that no longer exist, some of which I used "back in my day."
And for many reasons, no, I don't recommend Etsy. You can find plenty of bloggers on the internet who have already espoused on this. In short, Etsy is no longer a place to easily find handmade goods without also paying money to be promoted amongst non-handmade items. Now you also have AI art to contend with.
All of this is why I propose that you build your art portfolio on a website or even a free blog site that gives you more control. This way, you can still have social media connections to your friends and family who would love to support you by buying your art, but you can also direct them to a place on the internet that you have far more control over. It's WAY more simple, and you'll spend WAY less time fanagling with settings that are over your head.
...Unless you are also awesome at web development language and marketing terms, then by all means, get complicated with selling on social media too. Or just use it as a portfolio! Honestly, it can be pretty disparaging to see how little your work gets seen on social media. But if you shift your mindset and stop caring so much about "being seen," or "free exposure" (which is a total lie; another topic....) it is a lot less stressful. I personally now see social media as more like a digital copy of what I do with my art. I put the good stuff on my own site and direct people there!
With your own website, you can:
- Keep people's attention on your work longer since there won't be ads or notifications
- Blog your thoughts without algorithm censorship
- Post art that is a little "edgy" or might offend someone, without censorship or having someone report you
- Enable coding options to dissuade AI from crawling your site without your permission (look up robots.txt - although I've recently learned this is not foolproof)
- Use things like Glaze and Nightshade to screw with AI machines using your art without your permission
- Take payments for your art without a company taking a big cut of your sales (a decent selling platform will have a percentage in the 2-3% range, plus 30 cents per sale)
- Easily collect email addresses of interested visitors for more direct marketing (Sidenote, I highly recommend this for selling to people who like your style and are actually interested in potentially buying your art when they see a piece they like. In fact, you could exclusively start out with emails or texts to people you know who want to be on your list, and just skip the website part at first!)
Granted, even a real website or blog-hosting site could go down at any time. They could be prone to hacking just as much as any social media site. Obviously, use a unique, hard-to-guess password with 2-factor authentication to reduce this risk. And don't download extensions/plugins (such as in Wordpress-based blogs) for it that you haven't thoroughly vetted. Sometimes those plugins get hacked, too!
However, I'm not saying it will be any easier. You'll still have to put in hours behind the keyboard in addition to making your art. You'll still have a learning curve as you figure out how to use the platform. You'll still have to direct the traffic to your site in various ways. But you can build your humble spot on the world wide web without much interference from a corporation that doesn't even care about you enough to provide customer service to you. Most importantly, YOU have control over your content.
Resources:
- If you plan to sell, first, get a Hawai'i GET license or Google one for your own state. Research what you'll need to do about taxes at the state and federal level. Taxes are complicated, so ask for your parents' help if you don't understand what on earth you read.
- Square Online - free site (you'll need to set up a way to accept payments, so you may need a parent's help if you don't have a bank account of your own)
- Shopify Starter plan: As of writing this, you can have a sales site with integrated social media selling for $5 a month. Shopify has great selling tools so if you want to upgrade later, you can. After using both, I much prefer Shopify over Square!
- Creative Hive videos and blog about selling your handmade work on your own website, including why Etsy is kinda lame now
- How to add a Paypal/Venmo button to your blog/site - sell at a lower cost (again, may need a parent's help with setup, and you'll also need a business license and possibly other things)
- Glaze and Nightshade tools to screw with AI using your art without permission
- How to Sell Your Art Online by Cory Huff (Amazon affiliate link) - Don't skip the parts about pricing your artwork! Your art is worth more than you think, and you can actually base this off numbers and not what you or someone else "feels like" it should be priced. But that's another blog post.....
- Cory Huff's website, The Abundant Artist