Social Media Top Tips: Hashtags and Tags

Thanks for joining us again this week. Today we’re looking at some more top tips to get your social media skills polished and your artist’s profile looking professional to catch as many new followers as possible. Our focus this week is tags and hashtags – some of these words fill people who are not as familiar with social media with dread. Remember it’s just jargon and once you know how to use them you’ll be well on your way.

Tags + your artwork = people seeing your art.

Repeat this formula in your head. Hashtags are like the host who introduces you to everyone at the party. Images aren’t made up of codes so it’s really important that you include some form of description. Hashtags serve this purpose, by describing your work you can post your art to the right people.

Whenever you post a new work online, tag your art with as many associating or linked words as possible (#abstract #print #woodcut #sculpture #artlover #landscape etc). This helps search engines cluster images together, and narrow down which ones are the perfect fit for your search results. So by tagging your work appropriately, you can greatly increase the chances of landing new followers.

Did you know: Instagram now allows you to preview the number of posts associated with that hashtag.

Take advantage of anything you can learn about tagging your art, SEO on webpages and ranking well online. Hashtags are just one small step to an effective online marketing strategy.

It’s also important to tag organisations or link into groups who you think will appreciate your work. By doing this you can start a conversation or just let them know that you’ve mentioned them. Use the @ key and their ‘handle’ their user name. If you’re a member of MAFA make sure you tag us @mafaartists or if you are exhibiting at a venue or gallery make sure you add their tag.

Shorten Your Links

Do your links look like this?

www. https://mafa.org.uk/manchester-academy-of-fine-arts-graduate-awards-2017/

Here’s the problem with these types of links:

• The link looks too long.
• The length makes it difficult to organize multiple links on one post.
• They are tricky to use on Twitter where every character counts.

There’s nothing uglier than a long URL. Instead of focusing on what really matters to your post, they distract the eyes with all their weight. Your message becomes lost in loads of //– and :

Shorten long URLs easily with sites like Bitly and Ow.ly.  

An alternative to shortening URLs is to post a link to the main website. Posting to the main website not only helps to reinforce your brand, but also keeps visitors longer on your site as they search for a particular post.