Boosting fine art print sales on Social Media

After six long months of effort, this article will outline how I went about trying to boost the sales of my “Fine Art” photos as print sales on Fine Art America and how successful I have been at that. I wrote about the plan for using Social Media as a way of driving traffic and buyers to my portfolio back in March, and really put the details into three articles in May. The first one was Using Social Media to boost wall art sales on FAA and the second, Social Media for Photographers – Part 2. Finally, the third one is here: Social Media for Photographers – Part 3.

So, what has happened in this six months? Unfortunately, not a lot! I shared this graph in May after a couple of months of activity on social media:

The total sales in 2021 at that time were $594. Today, that number has increased to $678 – an increase, yes, but not great, and easily outweighed by what I have spent on various tools and applications to help maintain my presence on social media. I did create a pretty complex database along the way that allows me to take the sales spreadsheet from the FAA site and create a range of useful reports and this is what I see:

I have certainly sold more products since that first graph in May – a total of six separate sales, but unfortunately they were all quite small items. I sold two small prints that earned $50 or so in total, two puzzles earnings $10 each, a greeting card pack and a bath towel. Nice to get some sales, but the total of $84 in three months is not great at all. I did expect to see some increasing traffic to my portfolio after all my efforts, but unfortunately that didn’t happen either:

The peaks in this graph have been when I directly advertised my portfolio site – steven-heap.pixels.com on a Facebook group that is formed by people that have grown up in Morgantown in West Virginia and I have shown them my portfolio of Morgantown images. I have also done some Facebook advertising that pushed people to a particular image that I had on sale and I have done some Pinterest advertising recently that also boosted the count of visitors. But, as you can see, the overall level is pretty flat over the six months.

But, before I get too depressed about this, I want to review what I have learned over the time!

Fine Art America route to sales

I discovered, via a discussion on the FAA site, that the most frequent path to sales is from a customer who sees a specific image in a Google search with a link back to FAA and they follow that to the specific image page on FAA and make the purchase there. They sometimes buy other things on FAA during that visit that they find via a site search I assume. So the key thing we would like to influence is the frequency that our specific images are seen via Google. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how we can influence that. Google and the other search engines obviously trawl over the FAA site and put our image pages into the search engine and I am sure they pick up the title and description that goes with the image. I did a test of this today and searched for the words that appear in the description of one of my images – I searched for “woodburn hall west virginia university graduation gift faculty” and saw these results:

Several things jump out at me – the first is that my FAA images come out at the top of the Image search page and the website is usually Fine Art America. There is a pixels.com image there as well. However the ads that form the first row of this search are all from FAA and, for some reason, show more black and white and sepia images of other people’s work. So FAA is advertising their site but they are presumably showing the top internal images for that search term. I tried that search on FAA directly and I did see these black and white images at the top of the page coming from a company called University Icons who specialize in black and white images of universities. So that perhaps means that I should do some more black and white and sepia versions of my images! This company gets the first four places with that pretty specific search, I get the next six! But that difference is enough to push me into invisibility in the Google ads that FAA runs. Another learning point is that I didn’t put print or anything like that in my search – just gift – which is interesting for our descriptions.

So it appears that thinking of the likely search terms that someone might use on Google for this sort of work and putting that into the description on FAA should pay dividends.

One second test I did was to add a word from the keywords of the image. I often put the same images on stock agencies as well (and they are keyworded the same for each as I don’t want the hassle of new keywords for the FAA uploads). So I searched for “woodburn hall west virginia keepsake” and what came up this time were the usual FAA ads (although more for Etsy and similar companies) and then my images from the stock agencies rather than from FAA. So I think this means that it is better to put the most likely search terms in your description rather than in keywords to get a better result on Google.

So that is the first path to FAA! The second path is the artists own marketing efforts, usually focused on their artist website. This is the area I have focused on for the past six months, and perhaps has not been very successful for me. Other people on FAA report more success.

The third path to sales is when someone decides they want a print, say, goes to FAA directly and then searches on the site for the subject of their print. This is where trying to boost your position in the internal search engine might pay off, but it is far from clear how FAA actually choose which images to favor in their search results. I did write a bit about this in the first of my social media posts linked to above.

LinkedIn

The way I approached Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn was to use a program called Buffer and publish one image together with a short text and a link to that image on my Pixels site. I have been doing this solidly for almost six months and to be honest, I am worn out thinking of which image to post next! I did sign up for a 12 month annual plan for Buffer so I might well try to continue with this for the rest of my term! The posts look like this:

I get varying numbers of views – sometimes closer to 1000 – it is hard to predict. I tend to get 4 to 6 likes and sometimes a nice comment or two. A few people click the link to go to my Pixels site, but not many to be honest. 66 people from LinkedIn have clicked the links in the past 5 months, although they have spent 37 seconds on average on Pixels and looked at an average of over 2 pages. This is the full picture from Google Analytics:

As you can see, Facebook is by far the most popular, although that is because of the promotions and advertising I have done there.

Facebook

As I mentioned before, I used an old business page called BackyardImage to post the same images and text as I just talked about above on Facebook and Instagram. I never actually go to my Instagram account – the people there are likely to be photographers and not interested in buying things. I get very few organic likes or comments on my posts although the number of people liking or following my page has gone up over time. I recently added a shop to the Facebook page as well:

This wasn’t very difficult to do – there is a template spreadsheet that you complete with things like the print page on FAA, the source of the image (which is on one of my other sites) the price etc. After you upload the spreadsheet, the shop is automatically populated with the products. I chose the cheapest product – the small print as my destination page on my Pixels site.

I joined a few groups – the most useful one has been the Growing up in Morgantown group and I post pictures that I have taken around the town. These usually get lots of likes and comments. Most of the time I don’t include a link to my Facebook page (although they can find it) but occasionally I do and I have also mentioned my portfolio of West Virginia images on the Pixels site once. That was not removed and got quite a few visits. So that works for me.

I have also promoted an image that I had on a 50% off sale using Facebook adverts, but without any sales and after receiving a free $20 credit, I promoted my article on my own Fine Art site – backyardimage.com – which talked about the different images of Woodburn Hall I have taken and linked through to my Pixels. That got 58 link clicks for around $15 but no sales so far! So it is hard to say that advertising on Facebook works very well for this business!

Pinterest

Pinterest has been my biggest waste of time and money! I paid for a course to understand Pinterest back in March and that was very useful in getting to understand how Pinterest works. I have tried to post at least 4 different pins every day for the past 5 months and the results in terms of click throughs to my products has been pitiful. I use Tailwind, which makes the process a little easier, but trying to get traction has been very disappointing. I tried a little bit of advertising on my own to try to boost my entry in the Billboard contest on FAA, but nothing much happened as a result. However, one of Pinterest’s business people contacted me and set up a call to discuss my account – the first one lasted 45 minutes, the second 30 minutes and she was very helpful in talking about which sort of pins worked. The ones with text that explained what was on offer seemed to be the most useful and I have spent more time recently on trying to generate those. They are a lot more work though! She also explained that there is a Pinterest Tag which you can install on your website and that allows the Pinterest algorithm to work out which sort of people are most likely to buy something (as it tracks the path to the shopping cart) and then it will show the pins to those people using advertising. She was suggesting $20 a day for 30 days….. However, FAA cannot load this tag on the Pixels site and so that is not going to work. They are looking into whether my own BackyardImage site (which has a prints page mirrored from FAA) would work with this tag, and if it does, I will let you know. Pushing a customer to the appropriate print page on my own site might be pretty difficult though so I am not holding my breath. I’ve tried what are called Idea Pins on Pinterest as well, such as this one about Vertical wall prints, but no sign of much progress towards real clicks to my artwork. So if I stop anything in the near future it will be the constant pressure to post clever pins on Pinterest. Six months is a long time to spend on doing this!

Results

As I said at the beginning, not good results so far. If any of you have got this far in the article and want to offer different ideas about how to do this external marketing, please let me know – I am open to ideas from all sides! But so far, zero marketing in previous years has been better than 6 months of steady marketing this year!