CAN PINTEREST HELP IMPROVE YOUR ART?

I must think so or this would be a really short post right?

First let me just say that I’m like a lot of you – “NOT ANOTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SITE!!!” I know I know – but trust me – Pinterest is worth it…and you can get in and out quickly!

I will show you how to find out what people think of your work.

For starters lets deal with that title – what if I told you that there is a way to see how your art stacks up against your competition? What if you could be that fly on the wall in the office of an editor, art director, agent, or fellow artist? What if you could know what people really think of your work? I’ll show you a very simple way to use Pinterest to do just this.

1. Make your own Pinterest account

BUT do it by logging in from Facebook or choose the setting so that every time you make a “PIN” it updates facebook.
Why? So people see your pins, visit your board, and re’pin your pins.

2. Type a Key word in the “search bar”.

In the “search” bar at the top of the Pinterest page after you’re logged in – type in something like “illustration” or “Children’s illustration” or “characters” and hit enter.

3. Click on “boards”

4. Click on a piece of art that interests you.

You might want to scroll a little – pick a goody! Ok – now pick five images to “re-pin” AND – pin them to your illustration board.  (I figured all this stuff out so if I can do it a snail can do it – I mean a snail with a high school educations. Sorry snails :( …make sure you REALLY like the images you’re re-pinning. These need to be images that you really admire and perhaps wish you’d created so be picky!  Also – if you don’t pin really good stuff people will ignore your board and that will kill this whole experiment.

5. pin one of your own images.

Now pin one of your own images and then throughout the next year or so, repeat this ratio – a handful of other artist’s images to one of your own.  I suggest you pin from your website or blog so that if people click on them they come back to your portal – but that’s not what this post is about. (You should still do it for marketing reasons.) There’s a way to download some thing-a-ma-jig to your browser so you can “pin” from any site – I don’t remember how I got it to work, you could ask a snail. I think I googled “how to pin with Pinterest” or something like that. I need one of those snails to do that stuff for me.

6. Below is a look at my illustration board on Pinterest. If you go there or zoom in, you can see how many times each image was “re-pinned”, or not re-pinned. – and here in lies the magic! You get to see how many votes or “pins” each image gets including your own. In a way people are casting their votes in an impartial way – self serving! They see something they like and they re-pin it for themselves. This is more valuable than a critique from friends in some ways because it’s a rather large sample size and it’s honest. The people pinning don’t really know or care that you’re looking at the data this way -they’re just grabbing images for future consumption on their own boards.

link to Will Terry's Pinterest boards

So how can Pinterest help you improve your art? You can learn a lot by seeing what people like and don’t like. If you’re work isn’t getting re-pinned as much as the other work you pin you have some work to do – but not in the blind – because you can see exactly what images people respond to the most. You might want to make a list of the things the popular images have in common – then compare to your work. However, this could also be a little dangerous if you follow it too closely and copy what is getting votes – you could become a follower- you still have to innovate but in order to create great art you have to consume great art!

Pinterest is in my opinion a very valuable tool for inspiration, strategy, and marketing – I’m starting to get emails and messages from customers who are finding me on Pinterest – and I hear it’s the fastest growing social network! so get pinning!

Folio Academy Gets 100 Likes on Facebook

Grand Prize for our 100th Liker on Facebook.

Here’s to Alyeen Laurel George Lim, our 100th liker on Facebook. Should we give her the usual $1,000,000.00? A trip to Hawaii? Or should we give her the GRAND PRIZE, a mention on FolioAcademy Blog?

Grand Prize it is.

Here’s to you Alyeen, let me mention you on the blog. 

Alyeen Lym is our 100th Liker on Facebook

Thanks Alyeen, and thanks to all our other “Likers” too, we wouldn’t have 100 likes if it weren’t for the other 99. Alyeen is a true friend however, she even shared on her Facebook page, saying “This is my husband’s cousin! His website is amazing! Check it out for art classes of all kinds for adults and kids!! A great homeschooling resource!” ~ Alyeen Laurel George Lim

Don’t judge me, love me, or when it comes to Facebook, Like me.

We’ve been around for a year and a half and you’d think that we would have achieved 100 likes a long time ago. FolioAcademy has hundreds of peeps using our videos in thirty countries around the world. But it wasn’t until December 28, 2012 at or around 6:37 pm Mountain Standard time, ding ding ding ding, Folio academy gets it’s 100th Like on Facebook. That is a small milestone, and hopefully we’ll get 1000 likes faster than 100 per year and a half.

who will be our 100th Liker

It took these two knuckleheads a year and a half to get 100 likes on Facebook. But they did it.

If face book is a popularity contest, and I guess it is, we are not the most popular kid on the block, yet. But hey, I was never them most popular kid in school either.

When we, at Folio started Facebooking, we ended up, or rather, we started out with three different Facebook accounts. I guess Will started one, I started one, and I think our web master started one, or I started two. And knowing just what to do with Facebook is a little difficult for a couple of knuckleheads like Will and me, but we are having fun with it and we promise to do better.

Social Media Marketing, AKA SEO is a must these days for any online business

Whether we like it or not, ours is an online business, and by the way, we do like it. We just aren’t left brained enough to love all the computer mumbo jumbo that comes with online anything. We looked into a pretty cool sales campaign company called Groupon a while ago and they didn’t want anything to do with us until we had at least 1000 likes on Facebook. Needless to say, we didn’t do a Groupon’s sale with our limited number of likes.

We love you to love us, but more importantly, we love you to like us.