Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Marketing to Your 69 Billion Facebook Friends

That's right, 69 Billion potential customers for your art! This post is about the Six Degrees of Separation which Facebook has now reduced to 4.7 degrees.

If you're not yet marketing your art using Facebook as a tool, you might want to give it some thought. It's one of my most powerful tools, yet some of my Etsy artist contacts are "scared" to give it a try. Someone might scam them. Someone might scam them at the local car wash, too, as happened to me several years ago when my bank card was swiped on an employee's personal scanner. I'm taking my chances with Facebook.

I held off using Facebook for the Studio because of software changes Facebook was making and I had no information on how to setup Gail Kent Studio, but it all worked out. I setup a personal page with 2 friends on it for several months, then made the transition to Artist Page Account. It was fairly seamless and I love having the Facebook Artist Page Account as a professional page.

Most of us have experienced psychologist Stanley Milgren's Six Degrees of Separation theory in which we meet people who know people we know, and we think "what a small world!" The world has indeed gotten smaller with worldwide internet usage. This morning I looked at the traffic on one of my artist sites to see, as usual, an international trail posted with visitors from Holland, England, India, South Africa, Kenya, and half a dozen American cities.



Here's a link to one article about the Facebook effect on the Six Degrees theory. http://gigaom.com/2011/11/22/six-degrees-what-does-it-mean-to-be-facebook-friends/. This reinforces my earlier post about marketing your art on Etsy and other sites and the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) as you choose your tags or keywords. http://gailkentpainter.blogspot.com/2011/11/marketing-your-fine-art-on-etsy-for.html.

With 10% of the world's population, 721 million sets of eyeballs my friends, as active users, Facebook has determined there are 69 billion friendships established according to the above article link. Whether weak connections, or strong, each one is a potential exposure of your artwork to someone who may be moved to actually connect with you to acquire your art. They may "trail" you for a while before buying in a way they couldn't before. They will know you; they will know your art. They will buy your art.

Before our US Thanksgiving holiday, I'll photograph and upload eight or ten new small works painted specifically for my reproduction site and put the small paintings on Etsy as affordable art for holiday gift-giving. They'll most definitely go onto Facebook, my number one marketing tool.

All the best,

Gail Kent
Gail Kent Studios

Find me or my work at the following addresses:
Gail-Kent.artistwebsites.com 
 Twitter -  Twitter.com/@Gail_Kent,  and Facebook -  www.facebook.com/GailKentStudio
www.etsy.com/people/gailkentstudio
https://sites.google.com/site/gailkentstudios (in process)



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