Tempted by those requests to boost or promote for only a few dollars? Constantly reminded by the free $10 credit to online advertising. This blog post will introduce you to the impact paid promotion has on your online art marketing.
Paying for Likes and Followers: Using promotions and boosting posts, is buying likes, followers, and interactions, so let’s call it’s what it is. When you click that you want interaction, that’s what your money is buying when you promote, boost or create a sponsored ad.
Algorithms: Due to the algorithms of social media controlling what you see, some people pay for promotions and boosts to help increase their post and photo view to additional audiences.
When you use you use a paid promotion, will increase your likes and interactions, and boost the percentages. You can see the impact of your promotion on your Insights (built-in analytics in Facebook and Instagram). The downside to this is that the interactions are not authentic audience building. You can’t bypass algorithms with promotions.
Boosting Gone Bad: I once boosted and promoted an image on my Instagram. It was the highest liked photo and the Insights percentages were the highest I had ever seen. However, once I looked where most of my audience and likes were coming from, I abruptly ended the promotion.
My likes were all coming from India. I had no ties to India, no art collection, no email contacts, no blog readers….so I was literally paying a company, or firm in India to like my photo. I bought likes, spent money, and didn’t actually build an authentic audience.
Real Fans: You can buy fans, but why not build a real following instead. Building an organic audience takes time, and is all about finding true fans who like your brand and your art. The consistent posing of quality content that people want to like, share, and comment about is worth more than 1000k paid likes that don’t actually care about your creative work.
Losing Fans: You will oftentimes plateau and not gain followers (or even lose followers) if you relied heavily on paid promotions in the past and switch your strategy to gaining real authentic followers. This transition is natural. Your accounts most likely have a large number of bots and fake accounts following you which you probably paid for.
Weeks after my social media promotional mishap, my recent new likes and follows slowly began to nose dive. This was because those paid for likes and followers were inauthentic. I appeared to be losing followers. But my numbers began to cease declining, and slowly began to gain followers again.
So should I ever promote?
While this blog post may seem to warn against boosting and promoting, this doesn’t mean that you should avoid promotions. You can still receive success from paid promotions if you use them strategically.
Think about what’s in your calendar and creative wheelhouse that you can leverage and market: If you have a new art piece you want to showcase, a big solo exhibition or art event coming up, or something else you want to promote, you can use promotions to boost it. Whatever you are trying to market and promote, get it in front of more people. Yes, you will receive some real new fans along the way (but expect to be buying paid likes, bots, and fake accounts too).
Interesting sentiment – this is a topic I’ve been debating since launching an instagram account solely for my artistic endeavors. At first, I noticed a great spike in organic followers, but soon found that the algorithm changed within the platform, so new followers gained through hashtags plateaued. Since then I’ve been playing around with the idea of paying for boosts, but after reading this, I think I’ll look into other avenues. Thanks for sharing your experience!