A Twitter Story

Thanks for sharing your story and that gives me some hope. Awesome work by the way.

First of all, beautiful pictures! I especially like the one with the church. Bet that'll be a big seller. And congrats on your sale!

For my part, I have a Twitter account, but not nearly as many followers. I post there every now and then. I have no idea how to get more followers.

Thanks for sharing - great work - I do have hope that it will work eventually!

Congrats Chris! That is awesome! Beautiful shots! Great to hear I'm still trying to figure Twitter out.

That is fabulous news! You just have to keep plugging away at these social media things because if you don't a potential sale will definitely not happen! Congratulations. I did start a twitter thing just a few months ago and am working on getting the hang of it and also trying to find potential followers that are not all fellow artists/photogs, of course I am happy to have and follow some of them too :o) https://twitter.com/ptulipstudio

Wow, good for you! Shows what diligence and talent put together can do!

Chris Congratulations! They are all beautiful!

thanks all... I will give you the trick to getting more followers... at first I just posted photos... then I started hash tagging... got a couple of followers but there was one trick that caused my followers to jump...

I started following people...

anyone...

My target is people who like to retweet things... so I find images somewhat like mine... if I am posting lighthouses I search for light houses... then I check who retweeted them... and I follow them... anyone who follows me I try and follow back... if you don't many unfollow...

I unfollow anyone who unfollows me... I also unfollow people who post porn... I have no problems with nudes but really don't need to go to twitter to find porn...

I search hash tags of things I am posting and follow people posting the same tags...

at first I only followed english speakers... but now I really don't care... I just follow them... who knows they might re-tweet something and the person who sees it could be a potential customer...

My goal is to get to 20k followers by the end of the year... we will see... good luck all

Great info and story ... congratulations!!

Congratulations! Your images are beautiful. I really like using the live oaks to frame the lighthouse. They brought back memories of my visits to St Simons year ago. A friend of my mother's lived there and we stayed with them several times. Also, thanks for your tips on twitter. I am still struggling with how to make the best of it. .

Thank you for sharing your experience as well as creating such beautiful art!

Chris,

We joined about the same time last year. You are a more established photographer.
I am new to making any art.

Just a side note: You have a bigger portfolio and many more views. I have the smaller portfolio
few views, but more views per image. Neither of us have hit our supposed critical mass here
on FAA. I think for photographers that is 1000 images and for artists over 30 images.

About Twitter, I am currently tearing down my follower base. I dropped from 17k people that
I follow down close to 11k. I have more currently as I add again. In the process I dropped followers.
People left dropping my profile from somewhere around 19.5k down to 17k. The people that left
did this routinely with an automated app. So what?

Why? Like in your case only one profile was a buyer. I am targeting far more now. I am going for the upper end
fine art market. I am not talking price. I am talking people interested in fine art for the sake of fine art.
I am also emailing local museums, I will go further afield. I am finding profiles on Twitter that are institutions and emailing directly
from their websites. This is a new tactic for me.

I had a conversation with a senior in marketing at one of the local colleges. Simple response from him
shove your stuff at them night and day until they take you.

I cleaned off my quickie offers for throw pillows and cards off of my Twitter profile. Nothing spam like, a bit more
class.

Congrats on your upcoming arrangements.


Dave

I am so "non -tech" that I do not know where to go on twitter to find who has unfollowed me. Where is this info?

It took 8K followers to get one sale? Yikes! Congratulations on the sale, but man that's a whole lot of marketing time.

Ann - I use a website, unfollowers.com to track who unfollows me... They have a free tier that allows you to unfollow 100 people per day...

David - I think its more like it took me 8k followers to start to figure out marketing and targeting my tags and keywords... I have been doing something along the shotgun approach and hoping for the best... There are peoples who's full time jobs is social media marketing... for me its just a hobby...

I also look at it as a big sale... St. Simons Island is full of people who have money and like to spend it... When I first saw that church above I was on a run. When I saw the church I stopped and grabbed a quick photo with my cell phone before coming back around sunset... While on that run I was passed by a Lamborghini and a Ferrari... along with more BMW's, Mercedes and Audis then I can remember... My sister-in-law lives in a rather humble home but the houses that back up to her's are $1 million plus homes...

So if I can get some traction there it could work out in my favor...

Thanks for sharing Chris!

Lol. I think you need to get your wife back for another visit. She will be so happy, I am sure she will gladly give you plenty of time to wander about.

Your captures are lovely.

Fantastic!

its one person who may come back and look for more later Chris esp,if u keep posting, also he may share with others his find ie u, and then it could mushroom! well thats a nice story antways, in the mean time well,done!

Jason - exactly... I spoke with them today and my "Amongst Mighty Oaks" photo will be in the lobby of the visitor center they are building right now... The building is on a very popular pier right where all the tourist go. It's going to be 4'x6' canvas. I have never printed anything that large before...the exposure is worth more then the sale price to me... not that I don't appreciate the sale price :)

they reposted my small twitter pic on their FB page and had over 800 likes and over 100 shares... I made sure to go to every share I could and like their shares... tomorrow I'll post a comment on a couple of the public ones and see if I get any bites... I also took the photos from the islands and made them a gallery... Once I finish going through the photos from the trip latter this week or next I'll create a blog post and tag and post it...

That is awesome!! Congratulations. :) I have also learned this trick in other platforms. I get followers to my blog in a similar way. If I do a blog with a dog painting, then I put that in the keywords "dogs" and then I go search for other people who blogged about dogs in the last day or so and I like their blogs, make some comments and follow a few. Works like a charm!

Chris,

Slightly off topic note....a local museum this morning emailed me instructions on how to submit work
for their new artists gallery. Similar goals, getting institutions to taking on works so that others will see and buy.

I am also going to set up a new board with a smarter title on Pinterest. Same work, just better reach. Hashtag extensively.

Addition: Thanks twice in one day Sharon Cummings.

Dave

Chris ,I just wanted to give you a follow up. Since reading this thread. I opened a twitter account and facebook both.I really have no real idea about the twitter but I joined a few people and clubs and such and also started tweeting some art work..My views have gone through the roof in the last few days. I am not sure how many people are following me but I have gone from just at 5000 to over 6000 in one or two days. Also I have 50 friends on facebook and am members of a number of clubs and keep getting invitations for friends..Social media is surely the way to go..It seems that is the pot of gold.To everyone that has posted all the things to do on social media.. I thank you as I think it is about to really pay off. Chris thank you once again.

Congratulations.
Dreams can come true - or so is the quote on one of my top selling typography prints.

@Nancy don't know if you were speaking to Chris or me.. but well..it wasn't a dream of mine,frankly my view rate is fine ..doesn't really matter really..I do art for art and therapy but it was a experiment .I read Chris's story here tried it and it does work,now if the viewers would decide to buy that would be great,but if it doesn't happen it won't stop me making art and putting it here...

I think I've been doing more or less what Chris is doing from the beginning, (only about two months ago) but lately It's been hard to get anybody to follow me back, and most that do follow me are either spammers or other artists. Just two weeks ago I didn't have to do much of anything to get 10-20 followers in a day, now I follow 100 and only a few follow me back. I don't know if it's me or Twitter is relatively of dead right now, kinda like the drop in sales (those that sell anyway) others are complaining about. I wonder if the number of followers is really important anyway, seems to me it's the database of your work you end up creating with links and hashtags that's the most powerful element of Twitter, that and the fact that the bots love tweets.