Using Social Media to boost wall art sales on FAA

I’ve been promising this for a while, but only recently have I been able to sit in a chair long enough to actually put pen to paper due to my strained back. It is surprising how long these apparently simple injuries can take to heal. Of course, playing golf last week may not have been the best idea…

Building my Portfolio

But back to social media. I have continued to build my portfolio on Fine Art America and now have 1450 images online. I didn’t keep a firm count, but I think I had about 800 images just a few months back. I’m doing this by working backwards through my Lightroom catalog and adding images that I think might make a good piece of wall art into a collection ready for FAA. I also update the processing on some of the images as I consider them – it is surprising what skills I have developed over the years and how those can make a big difference to the finished image. All of these images had previously been uploaded to various stock sites over the years and so they are already keyworded for search engines and so there is not much that needs to be done when I upload a batch to FAA. The one thing that I wish I had done more of is to expand the descriptions. These are often just one sentence long and basically describe what is in the image. I’ve noticed that many FAA artists have longer descriptions including some commentary on what made them produce that particular image, or adding more details about the subject. The idea here is that Google and the other search engines will read this and more pertinent details about the subject will result in that image appearing in more searches than a simple one about the location, for instance. Most of my images are of places rather than being abstract artistic shots and so adding more appropriate detail should have been easier, but I took the view that just adding more decent images was more important than expanding that description field but that is guesswork on my part! I’m currently in mid 2016 in my review of older images and so I have many years worth of art to still go through!

With each upload, I choose either an existing collection or add a new one if it is going to be the first of many similar images. Another point worthy of note is that other artists talk about restructuring these collections so that the best images are always seen as the first ones when the collection is opened. Currently each newly uploaded image goes in the first position in the collection which is potentially not the best approach. However, until I have most of them uploaded, I think I will save that task until later. As a result, my site appears like this – the large image in each collection is simply the latest image I have uploaded to that collection:

Getting a good search position within FAA

There are three potential paths to a buyer first seeing one of my prints. They might search on Google, look at the image results and see my image there. Secondly, they may be browsing their social media feed, and see one of my images in their feed and click through to the image itself on FAA. And thirdly, they may already be on FAA and using the internal search engine to find a print that meets their needs. It is that latter approach that I want to first address.

The search algorithm on FAA is obviously secret to them, but you can sort of work out what they are taking into account by careful reading of the various “sales-related” posts on the forum. Incidentally, they have added a very interesting feature to the Sales discussions in the forum – they have annotated each post with the artists average sales volume per month. As a result, you can see at a glance who is really doing well in sales and perhaps give the comments from that artist more attention. A number of the people who regularly comment in the sales discussions have sales of 20 or 30 items a month. Not all prints, by any means, but it shows that they know what they are talking about. I’m currently shown with one sale per month!

My best guess about getting a good search position for a “search term” is that the algorithm takes sales of that image into account first and foremost, but then it also looks at visitor counts, likes, favorites and perhaps comments to highlight other images that perhaps have not yet had sales. So getting into the search is the first key objective by putting suitable keywords into the system – using the obvious descriptive ones, but also more emotional ones as well if you can. I think that having the really important keywords in the title and the description is also key to a good search position. For some of my WVU images, I have also added keywords such as Graduation Gift as I guess that some people might be searching for something to give a graduating student from that university and so they might directly search for a gift.

This “more unusual” keyword is also helping me gain some advantage in the first of my paths to finding your images – the Google search. For instance, I just did a search (in incognito mode) on “Graduation gifts WVU wall art” on Google Images and I see the following:

As you can see, my image of Woodburn hall at WVU is in the second row of the first page with a link back to my personal Pixels site. This is the one that all paid members of FAA get, and I always use this in any posts because all of the images on that site are mine. If the customer does a search on the website, only my images appear whereas a similar search on FAA will bring up everyone else’s image. So always focus on your own site rather than the main FAA site.

What was also interesting about this search is that a little lower down the page were some images of mine from the main FAA site on various sorts of products – framed prints, canvas and even face masks. So adding those few words to my descriptions has given me quite a few positions in a Google Image search with no added effort on my behalf.

I’ve read nothing that suggests that the price you choose has anything to do with search position. Most people are of the opinion that price is not a major decision for most buyers – they want the picture they like first and then they will look at how much it is. So “going cheap” is not really going to give you more sales, and, in fact, I tried that last year and nothing happened at all. My current FAA markup prices are here:

The only thing I did with this set of markups was to reduce the price of the smallest print because this is often displayed with the image before you finally go to the sales page. I didn’t want to lose out that initial interest because I looked to be more expensive than someone with a similar image. Again, a bit of guesswork, but that is where I ended up!

There are quite a number of groups on FAA dedicated to getting you more likes and comments and I have played with some of those. I think I have managed to move certain images up the search order by getting more likes and comments (I tried hard with some of the WVU images and certainly moved some from page 2 of the results onto page 1). It is quite a task to do on multiple images though, so I would recommend you try this only for images that you really think should be selling better than they are.

I also surmise that entering contests can make a difference – not particularly if you win (which is hard unless you have many friends you can persuade to vote for you!) but just because it shows involvement in the site. If I was in charge of the site, I would tend to rank artists who show an interest in the site by commenting on the discussion forums or entering contests higher than someone who simply upload and forget. I did see one reference in a discussion about featured artists on the site which suggested that helpful and friendly contributors were more likely to be picked to be featured on the site – again, that makes some sense bearing in mind how many artist portfolios they have.

There was also a discussion about the visitor counts that you can see on FAA – in total for your portfolio and also by image. Bear in mind that many of these are bots – if I post an image to LinkedIn, say, I get an immediate uplift in visitors, well before any real people can have seen it and reacted. I understand that other social networks have a similar response – I guess they are first checking the link, then bringing back a thumbnail and whatever other functions they need to confirm that this is going to be a valid post with a valid and safe URL. One contributor did a graph of the relationship between visitors per month and sales per month and found quite a solid relationship between the two. People with higher sales tended to have higher visitor counts as well. So bear that in mind when we come to external marketing.

So my conclusion is that you can do yourself some benefit by playing the good contributor on the site and so if you have a bit of spare time, spend it by looking at those discussions or taking part in a mutually beneficial commenting session!

External Marketing on Social Media sites

A common comment among contributors with higher sales averages is that you just cannot leave FAA to “do its thing” and hope that you will get sales. FAA does advertise our images in Google search results and Pinterest (and presumably Facebook), but if you just upload and forget, you are not going to get many sales. For many years, this is exactly what I have done – I got my occasional sales and was happy with them, but I never had any plan to boost these sales with external marketing. Comments from people who rarely sell tend to almost always say – I don’t have time for/don’t understand how to market my images. So it seems clear to me that in order to get more sales on Fine Art America, you need to actively market yourself! You may get occasional sales by doing nothing, but I believe that you get more sales and have a bigger bang for your buck by creating your own Social Media publicity plan and sticking to it!

I’m going to split this post into two, otherwise it will get far too long. So part 2 will be the actions and approaches I have taken to try to improve my own marketing efforts and how I have approached each social media site. But as the last suggestion in this post, I think it would be well worth your time to complete a free course that was created by Google and the Open University in the UK on the Fundamentals of Digital Marketing. This is a course that is split into 26 modules with video presentations for each of the lessons within the modules. The full course is expected to take 40 hours to complete (and you can separately obtain a certificate if you want to if you pass a written exam). However, these 40 hours are if you watch each of the videos in turn – there is an option to view the transcript of each video and I am choosing to just read the transcript, complete the knowledge quizzes that accompany each lesson and make progress much faster that way. Of course, you may prefer watching videos – I’m more old school and prefer reading!

I’m currently on module 14 of 26 and I’ve learned things that I wasn’t very clear about as I have gone through it. So although this may not be for everyone, there is no harm in educating yourself on these fundamental pieces of information.

You will find the next part of this story here!