Selling Your Artwork On Social Media

Okay, so the world went to shit, and you’re options are curl up and rock in the fetal position (not a bad temporary solution if it makes you feel better, who am I to judge?), or you can accept that you’ll have to adapt, improvise, and overcome. Just as with all life, our businesses have to adapt to a changing environment in order to survive. It’s scary and it’s mandatory.

Teach me your ways!

First, I’m not an expert nor am I perfect. I’m just a dude writing down the lessons I’m learning while trying to do all of this for my own art business. You’re mileage may vary, but hopefully you’ll find something useful in this new Covid Shift series. For my art business, in-person sales are my main income, with online, consignment, and wholesale usually picking up the slack from bad weather days or weeks where markets are rained out or slow.

I will tell you this, that regardless of how you try to sell your work online, you should try several methods to see which performs best. The goal here is to multiply your revenue streams like spokes on a wheel so that you’re not relying on a single spoke to keep the wheel spinning.

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Note: I sell reproductions of my art. It’s not jewelry, one-of-a-kind, big, bulky, or specialized. You’re smart enough to adapt what I’m writing here to what it is your creative business sells, but I’m not patient enough to write something that tries to cover the myriad of forms of art you could sell. You will have to do more work than just making your art if you’re doing the COVID shift.

Social media

This is both a selling channel and an advertising channel, and they work well hand-in-hand if your main buying audience is already there or you can readily find one there through the advertising. Both Instagram (IG) and Facebook (FB) have powerful selling tools these days which allow you to tag your products in posts on your business pages or accounts, but they do require some prior steps and setup.

Instagram

You’ll need a business IG account to have a shop. You don’t have to have a separate account just for your business, but I highly recommend it. Learn how to do that through this link.

Facebook

I have website of my own. It has a catalog of items. That’s my main catalog, and contains everything I sell. Everything else branches out from that. My Etsy shop sells some of the same items. My FB/IGshops sell most of the same items. You don’t need a website or Etsy shop to setup a shop on FB or IG, you can sell straight from those platforms. It’s free to setup via the Commerce Manager on FB, which can automatically talk to a business IG account. This article, and this one, walk you through the steps if you want to setup a shop.

The basics

The articles I’ve linked to will get you started. It is quite a bit of work to set things up to sell on social media using their “shops” features. You don’t have to use them, you could just post a photo and description on your account or even in the FB marketplace and take payments through Square or Paypal.

If you have questions, comments, or idea for other articles, just leave them in the comments, I’ll do my best to answer them here or in future articles in the series. I already have plans to write about selling in consignment shops, selling wholesale, and selling on Etsy. Be sure to follow the Facebook page to get notified when new articles are posted and to keep the conversation going. Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope it was somewhat helpful. We’re in this together living that #marketlife and #thatartistlife.