Advertising for Arts Organizations using Social Media

Social media marketing is an extremely effective method for advertising the arts; using social media to promote a project can be overwhelming.  Optimizing your presence on the internet allows you to promote your content and drive viewers to your call to action, whether it be purchasing tickets or viewing a video. The applications of advertising on social media are endless. 

Create a Brand 

The best way to create a brand is to look deep into the arts you are advertising and decide what you are trying to depict to the audience. The image you create for the project will be the first impression that the audience gets, so you want to make it perfect. Creating a brand comprises many elements, including picking a font, colors, sizing, and creating logo. Once these elements are set, you must use them for everything you do moving forward to maintain brand continuity. 

Develop Campaigns 

Once you have branding guidelines in place, you can brainstorm and develop campaign plans, which are extremely important when advertising for the arts. In simplest terms, a social media campaign is a post you plan to do more than once that centers around the same idea. This can be a video series, informational posts, or a series of posts chronicling the project you’re producing. As a rule of thumb, you should plan at least two campaigns for every social media account you are managing; this ensures that there will never be a dull spot on your feed, and you can maximize the promotion of the project.

Optimize your Captions 

Captions are more important than you think; they are the perfect space to provide the information you can’t include in the post. Specifically, when advertising the arts, you’d want to take this opportunity to sell tickets and direct the consumer to the ticketing link. Another great method for optimizing your caption is creating and using a hashtag that pertains to the art. Making the hashtag easy to comprehend, catchy, and clever is beneficial.

The formula for optimizing your caption is simple: use a catchy line to grab the viewers' attention and address the content of the post, implement the catchy hashtag for your project, and finally, have a call to action.

Try Different Methods 

Not every campaign will be effective when advertising the arts on social media. You will have to pivot and divert your efforts to more effective content. For example, if you have been posting and curating a video series but the social media users are only watching the first ten seconds of a two-minute-long video. This means viewers aren’t engaging with the content, so you may want to pivot to a photo series or reels. Another great way to diversify your content is to try to meet the trends on social media at the time; currently, TikTok and Instagram Reels are taking off. Consider looking into the best ways to maximize your social media presence.