Social Media

As an artist trying to get my work out into the world, I have to use social media more than I want to.  And as an older guy, every platform is annoying in its own way.  

The first one I was ever on was Facebook.  I've found that to be a good way for me to keep in touch with my real-life friends.  Eventually, I figured out that my personal and art professional pages needed to be separate.  So I created a page for my studio work (https://www.facebook.com/Studio.of.Skip.Rohde).  Later, I added another for my wedding painting work (https://www.facebook.com/Asheville.Event.Paintings/).  Both of those are open to the public.  I keep a wall between my personal and studio pages, though.  If I don't personally know somebody, I don't take their friend request to my personal page.  

I've found Facebook to be a complement to my websites.  It's like an easily-available resume.  Both the studio and wedding painting pages have a huge amount of images.  The studio page has the images arranged into photo albums of related work, while the wedding painting page has all the images on one file.  For those who are interested in my work, it's easy to see what I've done.  Both pages are much more complete than my websites, and they're chattier and more relaxed as well.  Neither gets a whole lot of looks, but that's okay - it's a resume that people can/do reference long after the initial posting.

My Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/skiprohde/) is pretty much strictly for my art business.  It combines both my studio and wedding painting inputs.  Instagram has more of a "church of what's happening now" feel than FB, at least to me.  For younger people (95% of the planet), it's more acceptable and cooler than FB, so my IG page gets more views than my two FB pages combined.  I think of it as another form of my artwork resume: almost all my output is there, it's just not organized into pages like it is on FB.

One thing that irks me about IG is that it seems to have an upper limit on the number of times it shows a post.  My account has a little under 1,000 followers, meaning people (or bots) who have said they want to see my posts, but IG only shows my posts to a small number of them.  I think Meta wants money to show my posts to more people.  Everything I've read from other artists says that's not the way to go.  I'm not alone in this: there are a lot of artists I follow, many of whom are friends of mine, that do great work and still only get 20-30 "likes", if that.  But FB has no problem filling my feed with posts by "name" artists that have thousands of "likes".  "Here", IG says, "you should like this work, too!"  Well, fuck that.  If any post has more than 200 "likes", they don't need mine, and I don't give it.  I support the smaller accounts that have great work but just a few "likes".  Suport your struggling local artist.

Pinterest is a strange beast.  I have a page for my studio work (https://www.pinterest.com/skiprohde/) and another for my wedding painting work (https://www.pinterest.com/skiprohde0389/).  I created the studio page years ago and it didn't seem to do anything at all for me, so I forgot about it.  Last year, I kept hearing that brides used Pinterest to find ideas for their weddings, so I created the wedding painting page and posted more on the studio page.  So the wedding painting page had a huge influx of visitors over the first few weeks.  I thought it was going to be great, but then it quickly tapered off to just a handful a day.  There are many posts that Pinterest has, literally, not shown to anybody.  Most of the other posts have just one or two showings.  The studio side is the same: everything has somewhere between no views to maybe ten views, except for one post that has over 4,300 views and counting.  WTF?  I can't figure it out, and actually, I don't care.

I had an account on Twitter.  Elon totally wrecked the platform, so I don't go there anymore.

As for other platforms, like TikTok, SnapChat, and LinkedIn, I'm not there.  Not going to be there, either.  Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest take up too much time as it is.  Social media is a time suck and I'd rather be in the studio.