Building a Social Media-Blog Strategy for Your Art Business Success

For an online business, having a social media strategy is becoming increasingly critical to success. Without a social media strategy, you will be missing out on a key way to build a following and maintain active customers.

The first step in building a strong social media strategy for your online business is to identify the social media networks that make sense for your business.

The two social media giants are Facebook and X (Twitter). There’s also LinkedIn, Alignable, and social media sites that are specifically for different industries. These Facebook and X are a must for most businesses. Creating a quality Facebook fan page and X profile takes very little effort and can be set up in just a couple hours. Daily maintenance also does not take much effort and can be easily outsourced or tasked out to your marketing department.

The important thing to keep in mind while putting your social media strategy into action is that you want to be consistently producing quality content for your following. You want to maintain visibility in the eyes of your followers. By keeping yourself visible, your followers will start to pay attention to you more and more and see you as a trustworthy source.

Social media is all about starting up a conversation. You want to build your own community of followers and get them talking. You want them to talk to you and each other. The more your followers are interacting on your social media networks, the more business they will be generating for your–both directly and indirectly.

Your social media strategy should begin with a blog (web log, an online journal). A lot of people do not think of blogs as social media, but they are probably the most important piece to your social media puzzle.

The reason blogs are so important is that you can display your true voice and give a ton of quality content. Getting blog subscribers will go a long way toward building your social network. The more people read your blog posts, so long as they are interesting and high-quality, the more your followers will begin to comment and interact with you and your other readers.

Then, the more activity you have going on with your blog, the more people will “like” and “tweet” your blog posts. This adds a considerable amount of strength to your social network. It adds a viral aspect to your social media strategy. Now you have people sharing your content with their friends outside of your social network. This brings more people into your social network.

In turn, this will build your conversation further, get more people commenting, get more people tweeting, get more people “liking”, and get more people interacting on Facebook. The viral effect will be in full effect.

Remember, the key to all of this is producing consistent, high-quality content. Be creative and unique with your content. Make them want to comment on and share your posts.

Your social media strategy will often determine the strength of your online business. Begin with your blog and launch the viral marketing snowball to take your business to new heights.