Tweetable Art: 10 Twitter Tips for Artists
Feb 25, 2009 Mashable
Natasha Wescoat is a licensed artist and social media creative at NatashasArtCandy.com utilizing the web to promote her art and connect with her audience. You can follow her on Twitter.
As an artist or creative business, one of your main goals is to connect with your audience and collectors. Social media allows us to connect and collaborate on a level we otherwise would’ve never known outside of the web. It allows collectors and fans to connect more intimately with the artist and allows for a stronger relationship with the art itself.
As an artist, I’ve found that Twitter is an excellent place for self promotion and connecting with my audience. The trick is knowing how to use it. As simple as it seems, there are things you should and should not do. To summarize, being relevant, open, sharing, and giving are the best policies for Twitter. Here are 10 ways artists can better connect with their followers on Twitter.
Have more tips to add? Please leave them in the comments.
1. Share your work in progress
Be creative and open. People love to hear about how you create your work. If you videoblog, post a link. Describe what you are creating and what you are using. People want to hear what you are doing, what it looks like, and what you are thinking.
Jeremiah Ketner (@smallandround) of SmallandRound.com, a gallery artist, tweets the progress of his work in text and photos, incorporating pictures from Twitpic and Flickr.
2. Share announcements
Do you run auctions online or own a shop on etsy? Do you have an upcoming show, interview, or art exhibit coming up? Announce appearances, shows, and new available art.
Anne Leuck Feldhaus (@annesart), an urban pop artist tweets announcements of upcoming art shows and exhibits weeks or months ahead. You will also find Anne live tweeting from the events she shows in.
3. Find and connect
Using Twitter for networking is the best part. Find people through the Twitter search function who would be of value to a business relationship or people who are interested in art. Build relationships through conversation about anything. Not just about art. Twitter allows for deeper, more meaningful business partnerships and relationships with your audience if you can converse with people on their level.
After connecting with their team on Twitter, I formed a business partnership with Black Card Circle and their foundation. As a result of that relationship I am showing my art in exclusive BCC events and donating my work to charities through their company.
4. Share Yourself
Share informative links to your blog, your stories, interviews, or other art news. Amie Gillingham (@gillie), an artist and co-founder of EBSQ, an online artist community and portfolio site, always offers links to helpful info for artists and collectors. In addition to her own content, she always shares and promotes other people’s links.
5. Research your followers
Use Search.twitter.com to survey what people are thinking about art, or what you do. Answer questions or tweets. Share. I’ve used search to find people who are interested in fine art and pop art. Simply search by keyword for a topic you like or would want to discuss and you will find other people to follow and connect with. Use keywords to find out who their favorite artists are, their favorite colors, or what their lifestyles are like. This gives you an opportunity to analyze the possible audience you can have or do have on Twitter.
6. Offer a collector club
If you use a private Twitter account, you can offer follower exclusives like promotional discounts, exclusive art prints, or sales info. This would work great for a collectors base on Twitter. I have yet to find artists who are utilizing this form of Twitter, but I’m certain that the idea is going to spread fast. The concept of immediate info and response to collectors would make the concept of a private Twitter club account very appealing to your group.
7. Announce site/shop issues
Announce when or why sites are down, or other problems. Having immediate information on why your followers can’t seem to buy that print or go to that blog builds trust. Elizabeth Stewart (@ecstewart) a licensed calligraphic designer uses Twitter to update on website maintenance, when new shop options are available or if the site goes down. It keeps customers from worrying or wondering when something is getting done. They can simply watch her tweets for instant updates.
8. Hold Twitter contests
Do Twitter contests and giveaways. Offering a fine art print each week or month to friends who RT (retweet) gives you traffic and new buzz. If they don’t win, they may buy something. Include a link to your portfolio or online shop to build immediate traffic and gain buzz.
I held a “Twitter Treats†Trivia contest where I broadcasted myself asking trivia questions via Ustream.tv and had my followers answer them on Twitter. Chrysti (@ArtByChrysti), a collage artist, uses Twitter to share her giveaways.
9. Collaborate with other artists or businesses
Connect and collaborate with other artists and businesses on Twitter. Share the wealth with your followers. You can gain a good reputation amongst your following and open up future business opportunities with the people you promote and share.
Artists like Maura McGovern (@mmcgovern and myself) are collaborating on a poster design with other artists for the Social Media For Social Change event this April. Without Twitter, this would have been pretty unlikely.
10. Offer instant commissions and orders
You can use Twitter to take commissions, custom request, or orders via tweets or direct messages. I’ve used DMs to send and receive messages from customers who wanted to purchase things directly through me. Twitter also allows me to live tweet followers as I’m shipping their order and give them details on when and how it will be shipped to them.
More Twitter resources from Mashable:
- Most Popular Twitter Clients Revealed
- HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter
- 20+ Great Twitter Tools for Firefox
- The 10 Users You’ll Meet on Twitter
- FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kasia75.
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Bank of Obama: Send a Bailout Check to Your Friends
Feb 25, 2009 Mashable
With so much debate about the economic stimulus package and the ongoing plans to rescue America’s banks, this site was bound to happen. Bank of Obama is a quick and fun parody of the current economic climate, allowing you to send virtual or real bailout checks from the President to your friends.
Input the name of who you’re sending a bailout to, how much to send them, the “memo†(with options like mortgage, car loan, and gambling debt), and a personal note and you’re on your way. You can then opt to deliver a virtual check to the recipient (like the one below), or for $2.99 via PayPal, have the folks behind Bank of Obama send the physical parody check to your friend via postal mail.
Actually sending the parody check might be a bit ironic. On one hand you’re complaining about the government frivolously spending your money, but on the other, you’re paying to send out worthless pieces of paper. Nonetheless, the joke will likely be appreciated by those that think the bailout and stimulus package are wasteful – not so much perhaps by those on the other side of the issue.
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Find the Right Maid Service with Bidmycleaning
Feb 25, 2009 Mashable
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Name: Bidmycleaning.com
Quick Pitch: Bidmycleaning.com is the simple new way to find and schedule house cleaning services.
Genius Idea: Renters and owners alike constantly struggle with keeping their homes spic-and-span. As a way to control the chaos, we sometimes turn to maid services, which usually come via recommendations from friends, though that can be an inefficient process with a no-guarantees outcome.
Bidmycleaning hopes their site can be your dirty digs best friend by making the search for house cleaning services, whether you need a one-time deep clean or a weekly refresher, as fast and rewarding as possible. The best part is that you get multiple bids to select from and you can even opt to have your home tidied up with eco-friendly products.
To get your quote, just enter your zip code, specify the type of cleaning you’re looking for, and let the maid service calculator do the rest of the work. Not sure what each service entails? That’s okay, Bidmycleaning has plenty of instructive text to help you decide whether you need a normal or deep clean, and includes clear descriptions of what you can expect from the available options.
We know it can be a little awkward to have a complete stranger invade your space, but since Bidmycleaning guarantees satisfaction, as well as encourages customer reviews and ratings, we hope that gives you a little additional piece of mind.
On the flip side, independent cleaners can turn to the service to get listed free of charge, and build up their client list and customer recommendations. Given that the site supports real-time calendar updates from customers, providers can set their available schedule and rely on Bidonmycleaning to manage their appointments for them.
We think that Bidmycleaning’s genius approach to maid service management provides both customers and service providers with a much needed and valuable resource. Would you use Bidmycleaning to find maid service or list your cleaning company? Tell us in the comments.
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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HOW TO: Connect With the FriendFeed Community
Feb 25, 2009 Mashable
Collaborative help for this guide was provided by Mona Nomura, a prominent member of the FriendFeed community.
Perhaps you’ve heard about FriendFeed over the last few months. Perhaps you’ve been intrigued by its ability to aggregate all of your social media and social networking feeds all into one place. Perhaps you’ve heard about its remarkably fast-growing community (3327% in the last year, 26.6% in the last month alone).
But maybe you’ve put off joining because FriendFeed’s community isn’t as simple as it might seem. Making new friends on FriendFeed can be tough for new users and even social media veterans. If you’re looking to truly utilize the fast-growing FriendFeed, understanding the community and making new friends is a must. That’s why we’ve put together this step-by-step guide to connect, network, and make friends on FriendFeed. Take a look and after you’re done, don’t forget to add Mashable on Friendfeed. If you’ve got additional tips, we’d love you to leave them in the comments!
Step 1: Make Sure to Add Your Existing Friends First
Why: Before going off to make new friends, make sure that all (and I mean ALL) of your existing friends on other social networks are your friends on FriendFeed. They’re the most likely to understand some of the tweets, blog posts, and YouTube favorites that are in your feed. It makes for a richer FriendFeed experience.
How: Lucky for us, FriendFeed provides A LOT of import options. Start with importing your Facebook friends. The FriendFeed Facebook application is a great app that can help you integrate your Facebook with your FriendFeed. Then search your Twitter friends and add them. Finally, if you’re comfortable with it, import your email contacts.
Step 2: Don’t Be Afraid to Subscribe to Strangers
Why: FriendFeed is not like Facebook, despite any similarities. Friendfeed is about discovering new content and you need to expand your circle to do that. Your goal should also be for people to discovery your content as well.
How: Start by subscribing to a couple dozen recommended friends. Don’t be afraid to subscribe to hundreds of people – there is no stigma for subscribing to a lot of people. If you want to find the top FriendFeeders, there is nothing better than Alltop’s top FriendFeed users. Robert Scoble and Louis Gray also put out regular lists of great people to befriend.
Tip: Don’t forget to add us! We love being your friends! Mashable’s feed; Ben Parr’s feed; Mona’s feed.
Step 3: Always Like and Comment on FriendFeed
Why: Liking and Commenting became such a strong feature on FriendFeed that Facebook decided to implement commenting and liking on their own news feed. It’s even more powerful on FriendFeed because it can help you get noticed outside of your circle.
How: We’re sure you can figure out how to comment and like items on FriendFeed. What some people don’t do enough of is continuing the conversation. In some ways, FriendFeed is like a message board – any time someone likes or comments on an item, it gets bumped up to the top of your feed. This allows you to continue a back-and-forth conversation on a key item. As you do more and more of this, more and more people will notice and subscribe to you for the most important reason of them all: because you’re interesting.
Step 4: Liberally Use the Hide and Block Functions
Why: Wait, isn’t this guide about making new friends? Yes, but you’re not going to do that if you have an intense headache from overflow or bad apples. FriendFeed can become very overwhelming, very fast. You will not survive if you treat your FriendFeed like an RSS reader – there’s simply too much information on FriendFeed. Don’t be afraid to hide items, and don’t be afraid to block anyone that you don’t want to hear from – be picky about your friends.
How: Here are a couple tips on using the hide and block features:
Hide: The hide feature will hide any FriendFeed item from your sight. But the important part is when it prompts you to hide other items like this one. If you want to control the flow, you need to specify exactly what you want to see. If you only like one friend’s blog, but not their tweets, then hide their tweets. You can even specify that you only want to see items that your friends found interesting enough to comment on. Be very liberal with the Hide function.
Block: We naturally have an aversion to blocking people – we want to give them lots of chances before we do it. But that’s not how you should use it on FriendFeed. If someone annoys you or just doesn’t interest you but keeps popping up due to Friend-of-a-Friend, don’t be afraid to block them. It is your feed; customize it with what you want. The customization is one of FriendFeed’s most powerful features.
Tip: FriendFeed’s Best of feature will show you the most popular entries among your friends over a day, week, or month. Use it if you only have time to scan FriendFeed. Make your life easy.
Step 5: Build Friend Lists to Manage the Flow
Why: Friend lists are effective ways to organize your subscriptions and friends. If you organize your subscriptions, it will be easier to find the content and the friends you’re looking for. It will also help keep FriendFeed manageable and compartmentalized.
How: The difficulty isn’t in building a list, but maintaining and organizing lists. Every time you subscribe to someone new, you have the option to add them to a specific list – take advantage of it then, because you’ll forget otherwise. Are they a big blogger? Make a list for favorite bloggers. Want to keep real life friends separate? Make a list for them as well. Lists aren’t exclusive – you can have multiple categories for each friend.
Step 6: Join Rooms, Create Rooms, Invite Friends to Rooms
Why: Rooms are an underutilized feature of FriendFeed, but even despite that, they do a fantastic job of bringing people interested in a single subject together. There are rooms for everything from Battlestar Galactica to social media. You will find friends with similar interests very quickly.
How: FriendFeed has a great room search system; it even suggests rooms based on their popularity with your friends as well and gives you stats on how many members a room has and the last time there was a post there. I even did some searching and realized that there’s a Friends of Mashable FriendFeed room (how did I not know this?!), so join up!
Step 7: Keep Your FriendFeed Fresh
Why: What use is your feed to others if you just make it and never log in again? The commenting, community, and discussion is the most valuable part of FriendFeed. So be sure to post cool websites, new ideas, and respond when people comment on your FriendFeed items.
How: Here are a few tools to help you get started with keeping things fresh:
Bookmarklet: Find something interesting on the Internet? You can share it directly to FriendFeed using the Bookmarklet. Sharing cool pictures and websites will make you very popular very quickly.
IM Notifications: If you want to know when anybody comments on your FriendFeed, you can activate IM notifications to inform you of new activity. That way you can comment back!
Post to Twitter: You can post some or all of your activity to Twitter via FriendFeed. If you want to have your YouTube favorites posted to Twitter, for example, this is the perfect way to do it.
Making New Friends Leads to Good Things
Finally, you may be asking yourself – why should I care about making new friends, and why FriendFeed? There are more things to do than just find cool websites and pictures; people are forging important friendships and using their relationships to do things like find jobs. FriendFeed is more community-based than almost any other social media website, so if you’re looking for another tool to expand your network in a meaningful way, don’t ignore FriendFeed.
More FriendFeed resources from Mashable:
- Top FriendFeed Tips for Twitter Users
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And The Oscar for Most Social Media Buzz Goes To …
Feb 25, 2009 Mashable
As one of the most-watched TV events of the year, last night’s Academy Awards were also a boon to blogs and tools like Twitter, as people looked to chat about their favorite films, stars, and the festivities.
So which movies and actors got the most buzz out of the event? New Media Strategies, a digital agency in DC, tracked it across blogs and Twitter to find out.
Not surprisingly, the results are driven largely by what happened – the night’s big winner, Slumdog Millionaire, received the most buzz on both blogs and Twitter, while the actors that won or presented awards enjoyed the most chatter, with two exceptions: Mickey Rourke, the eccentric star of The Wrestler, was the most blogged about actor, while Angelina Jolie, who the cameras cut to roughly every 15 seconds, was the most blogged about actress.
Here’s a look at the most blogged and tweeted about movies and stars:
Most tweeted about films:
Slumdog Millionaire: 6,369
Milk: 3,617
Wall-e: 1,284
Benjamin Button: 1,110
The Wrestler: 1,070
Dark Knight: 893 (add in Heath Ledger mentions and you get 3,503)
The Reader: 814
Frost/Nixon: 543
Kung Fu Panda: 139
Most tweeted about individuals:
Sean Penn: 3,040
Heath Ledger: 2,612
Mickey Rourke: 2,040
Penélope Cruz: 1,843
Hugh Jackman: 1,827
Kate Winslet: 1,250
Angelina Jolie: 912
Brad Pitt: 592
Jennifer Aniston: 422
And the most blogged about in the major categories:
Best Picture
Slumdog Millionaire**  28,909
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button  20,939
Frost/Nixon  8,341
Milk  20,676
The Reader  16,123
Best Director
Danny Boyle**  8,158
David Fincher  3,791
Stephen Daldry  2,381
Ron Howard  3,183
Gus Van Sant  3,591
Best Actor
Sean Penn**  9,132
Mickey Rourke  17,828
Richard Jenkins  3,078
Frank Langella  3,432
Brad Pitt  16,741
Best Actress
Kate Winslet**  16,106
Anne Hathaway  11,428
Angelina Jolie  21,831
Melissa Leo  3,983
Meryl Streep  7,287
Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger**  17,336
Josh Brolin  4,113
Robert Downey, Jr.  6,242
Philip Seymour Hoffman  3,290
Michael Shannon  2,518
Best Supporting Actress
Penélope Cruz**  19,725
Amy Adams  6,779
Viola Davis  4,579
Taraji P. Henson  4,615
Marisa Tomei  6,306
As for the Oscar moments getting the most love on YouTube, it would look like Sean Penn’s politically charged acceptance speech for Best Actor and Ben Stiller doing a spot-on Jaoquin Phoenix imitation are the early front-runners. The latter (which also features the lovely Natalie Portman 
) is embedded below for your enjoyment:
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