Artists’ Guide to Growing Instagram Audience

An artist needs to promote their art to get recognized. It’s never easy to do this, given the many unique artists around the world. To stand out amongst the thousands of artists online, you will need to grow your Instagram audience.

A good Instagram following is an asset to every art business in the 21st century. But having just a few hundred followers is never enough; most of these followers might just be your friends and family. What you need to do is make yourself noticed in the algorithm.

Posting just one picture and waiting for it to get to 1000 likes will make the road to success long and hard. However, there are many strategies that you can adopt which will help you grow your Instagram audience within a month.

Strategies to Grow Your Instagram Audience

1) Instagram Profile

To first get started on Instagram, you will have to make a stellar profile. How you present your profile matters, which is why you should try to choose a profile picture that stands out. The best you can do is paste your artist logo as your profile picture. Instagram audiences like to see their favorite artists work signed with their official signature or a logo.

You must also choose your username wisely. Having too many random numbers is not a good choice. You can try to add your name as your username. But if you have a business name, then you can use that as well.

On your profile bio, you must use relevant keywords. These keywords will depend on the type of art you create. Instagram audiences always check the bio to understand the profile a little better. In your bio, you can even add a part of your artist statement.

Instagram also allows the use of one link, and you can add links to your website, other social media pages, your online shop, and so on.

You can also try setting up your Instagram page as a business page. This way, you will get access to different analytics available on Instagram.

2) Your Feed

You should be spending extra time on how to make your feed look beautiful. Having random clusters of posts on your feed won’t be a good aesthetic, and at the moment, aesthetics are really important.

Make sure your posts have good lighting in them, as your Instagram audience will want good-quality pictures to truly appreciate your art. The best tip for taking good lighting pictures is to take them in bright daylight.

Try finding a white wall that you can take a picture of your art against. Avoid off-white colored walls as they can make the image look dull and will skew the colors of everything put next to them. Not only will your pictures look awful next to off-white colored walls, but your pictures will also need to be edited, and this will take extra time.

Remember, even if you have a white wall and good daylight to take pictures in, you still need to edit your pictures. There’s always something to adjust in pictures, but the biggest tip you’ll ever get is to simply increase the brightness of your photo. This will do wonders for your feed and help catch the audience’s eye on Instagram.

You do not need to learn photoshop to edit your pictures. You can simply download apps on your phone, which can do just as good of a job. Some good apps available online include Snapseed and VSCO.

3) Posting Consistently

When you first start your Instagram page, you will need to increase your audience fast to get recognition. Posting at least once or twice a day can truly help you gain recognition on the platform.

This may seem excessive, but it’s important, and you will see the benefits of it on your business account, as Instagram provides analytics of everything on business profiles.

On days that you do not post, you will see a decrease in your profile’s performance, you won’t get that much engagement, and not many people will view your profile.

4) Art Community Engagement

To get your art recognized on Instagram, you will need to interact with other Instagram artists. The art community on Instagram is huge, and everyone is supportive of each other. Interactions not only help you build your Instagram audience, but they will also help your other artistic friends on Instagram gain the recognition that they deserve.

Try to like as many posts as you can, especially those related to your niche. Don’t be too picky with what photos you like; just try to like every art-related post. By liking another artist’s post, you are getting their attention on you and also helping them grow their audience.

There are many artists on Instagram that will like your photos back and even comment on your page. When your followers or anyone else comments on your photos, you should comment back fast (try to comment within the first hour of posting). Instagram’s algorithm shows that the more engagement you get on your post in the first hour, the more audiences it will reach. Also, by replying to a comment, you are showing your appreciation for your audience. 

And don’t forget the importance of a good caption! Always write stellar Instagram captions to gain engagement for your art business.

5) Hashtags

You need to use hashtags on your Instagram posts. Instagram will allow you to add a maximum of 30 hashtags on each post, and you must make sure that you add at least 11 hashtags.

Using 11 or more hashtags on Instagram will increase the engagement of your posts. It’s not recommended that you use hashtags that have more than 1 million posts in them unless you already have a huge number of followers on your page. 

Grow Your Instagram Audience – Conclusion

While managing social media, along with proactively creating art, does not seem like the easiest combination, it’s still another way for you to express your artistic side, as even Instagram posts require editing.

Not only are you gaining talent through posting on Instagram, but you are also increasing your Instagram audience. Hence, enhancing your career in the field of art. In the end, it’s all about how you manage your time as an artist.