I was scouring the interwebs today when I came across the following beauty.
For context: An artist (painter) asked for tips and tricks to grow their social media—hoping to increase their sales—on a “business for artists” forum.
One of the responses?
Read it here yourself:
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“The best advice I can give is: forget about social media and online business – do real life exhibitions instead. It's easier to connect with your audience IRL, which makes selling easier as well (and you'll get a much better compensation for your work). I have been a full-time visual artist (mainly paintings) for 27 years now and I do one or two solo shows and a handful of group events every year, and that's more than enough to make a living.
Sure I have social media, but the time and effort it takes to first grow a following big enough to get some consistency in sales and then the time and effort it takes to make those sales is just not worth it IMHO – with a fraction of that effort I make a lot more sales IRL. If I have to calculate my earnings based on time spent for the sales I make online, I am better off flipping burgers.
For reference: I have about 10K followers on FB, IG and X combined – FB being the largest and if I make a sale, the buyers mostly come from there.”
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Now listen up, I’m not here to tell you how to live your life…
BUT.
If you’ve got a combined follower count of 10k (that’s ten THOUSAND people) on social media, and you still struggle to make sales (or at least, find it not worth the effort, so much so that you’re discouraging others from even trying) then, and I say this with the utmost respect, the problem doesn’t lie with “social media and online business”, the problem, my dear friend, lies with you and your ability to be entertaining and persuasive (as opposed to manipulative—big difference) enough.
As the great late John E. Kennedy said, “Advertising is salesmanship in print”.
So if you’d know how to sell someone in-person, as the author of the post said he could, then you can use those very same principles to sell someone on social media—which ultimately is a form of advertising.
Except people nowadays don’t actively make the connection between social media, advertising, and salesmanship.
Such as shame, really.
Anyway.
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