Building a Social Media Presence with No Budget

[michaelson]

Don't forget that your comic must be good and interesting in order to achieve succcess, unfortunatelly 99,99% of the comics fail to match those two requirements, the market is so saturated with comics that getting noticed is almost impossible, your comic must be beyond good, it must be god like

I think part of the reason why it seems so saturated is because we're dealing with a relatively niche market or niche marketing circle. I think we should try and expand our horizons in terms of where we advertise and promote our own content.

I see the terms "getting noticed" a lot and it seems to imply passivity. I feel like this sort of inspires the wrong kind of mentality at times? Like, if you make good work, then one day you'll get noticed is probably not the best approach to creating a social media presence. For the most part, I think we view social media in this way because a lot of the already established creators do this with their social media accounts, just posting good content and they get a lot of likes. But what's important to think about is that there was a lot of grunt work put into establishing that type of reach and behavior.

I noticed that image posts tend to work the best on Facebook and Twitter too, they make your page look nice and colourful

Yeah, I think image based posts work the best for social media in general. One of the places that I'm really interested in is Instagram. An entirely image based posting platform. I know you can have clickable links on your profile, but other than that, it's almost impossible to funnel people to your site - YET - a lot of people use it for social media. It's fascinating!

I don't make as much stats and experiments but I simply try to be a part of the webcomic community. Makes friends and see what's out there.Hopefully people want to know more about myself and what I do in return!

Creator networking is definitely helpful!

Ummm, can I ask for help with Facebook? Everything I do is shown on the timeline, how can I disable it at once? (I don't get this at all, who wants to be notified that I changed my profile photo? quickly regretting the decision to revive my FB page)

You can hide posts from your timeline by clicking on the top right hand corner of the post and accessing the drop down menu.

[el_fury]

Yes, and it's awesome! Too bad it doesn't have any Tapastic recipes yet.

[el_fury]

Knowing peak traffic times on certain social media sites helps too! I've been using this to track peak traffic times for Tumblr. I think it's helped, though I have no data to back it up. Might be time to start using bit.ly!

And Instagram was fairly easy to figure out. People (myself included) tend to check Instagram at work, so I try to post around lunchtime. Also, it's the only platform where it's acceptable to spam hashtags. So figure out what hashtags are popular and run with it!

And take advantage of trending hashtags and try to stay ahead of the curve. On National No Bra Day I posted an "awkward no-bra hug" animation on Instagram with the hashtag #nobraday and it performed really well compared to my other posts.

Part 2 of your post really resonated with me. I'm one of those people who is embarrassed/anxious abut showing off my comics to friends and family. So I started at like 2 followers on each of these platforms and built up from there. I could easily get my content exposed to 300+ people on Facebook, but I'm so caught up in "But what if [insert super religious family member here] sees my comic about [insert potentially offensive subject here]??" that I haven't started a fan page, and may never start one. :c I thought I was the only one with that problem.

[carodoodles]

I did notice that images I posted up on my page got more attention than any links could. Should I just post sample pages and then link to my site?

For me personally link based with one image (preview or first panel of the comic) didn't really result in much shares. Images based posts did result in a lot of shares. That's why I'm bummed out about fb not allowing combo of regular images and GIF images in one post. Plus, fb isn't friendly with taps-style vertical posts so I often had to re-arrange my taps comics to make it more viewable on fb. oh well a bit of work is worth it- AND you can have it print-ready easily for printing comics into a book. I'm willing to do a bit extra work because most of my audience is on fb.

[jmhenry]

For me personally link based with one image (preview or first panel of the comic) didn't really result in much shares.

Yeah I tried that a few times and got the same result you did. I am finding out though, that sharing posts from your fanpage to other groups helps out a lot, especially if people in those groups share it afterward. Anytime I try it with an image based post it tends to wind up doing better than most of my old ones.

[JenThym]

Love the tips in here, and love your honesty too. When I was promoting my first web series, I got a healthy response from requesting reviews from websites that specialized in that and made lots of friends in the process. Not sure if there are alot of web comic review sites out there, but it's always worth asking around!

[ratique]

Working hard and am trying to post something on facebook twice per week. Does not sound like much, but it's two posts more than before! I feel like I am in "Social Media Training".

[Chiper1811]

@michaelson Just out of curiosity, do you post only comics strips or do you post other materials as well, such as memes, jokes, relevant articles, etc? One thing I learnt from my blogging friends is to make your facebook account as visible as possible to your followers to build your own community of fans. That means you have to post several times per day, with contents that are potentially shareable (viral). But since a comics fans community might be a little different from, let say craft blog community, they might not appreciate extra 'stuff' like everyday articles, etc.

[michaelson]

@michaelson Just out of curiosity, do you post only comics strips or do you post other materials as well, such as memes, jokes, relevant articles, etc? One thing I learnt from my blogging friends is to make your facebook account as visible as possible to your followers to build your own community of fans. That means you have to post several times per day, with contents that are potentially shareable (viral). But since a comics fans community might be a little different from, let say craft blog community, they might not appreciate extra 'stuff' like everyday articles, etc.

We used to post a large variety of content earlier on. We posted art tutorials, videos, previews of upcoming comics, memes, and links to our (now defunct) blog.

We also used to post twice or three times a day, eventually we wained off of this because our average reach per post was not dramatically effected by this.

I would say that it makes more sense to post more frequently when you're trying build up your audience and slowly curb that down over time.

[Peej]

These Facebook pages that you speak of....
Is it better to set up a Facebook account using the name of your comic/strip and set up a page for that, use a personal account and create a separate page for ones comic or some other combination?
I never figured that one out.

[Chiper1811]

@Peej Depends on how you want to present yourself to readers/fans. Do you want yourself to be known just for a particular work/project, or do you want to put your name forward as a brand name (i.e. author) where fans can find your other projects in the same place. The advantage of setting up an fb account for a particular project is you will not bombard readers with updates that they don't need, but you'll miss the opportunity to do cross-promotion. Another disadvantage is if you have too many FB accounts you might find it difficult to maintain all of them as you have to deal with many different audience groups. Hope that helps put things into perspective.

[fanyart]

You can hide posts from your timeline by clicking on the top right hand corner of the post and accessing the drop down menu.

Ah, thanks, that helped a lot!
Is there also a way to prevent those "activity" posts from showing up on the page in the first place? Like... if I "liked" something to help a friend but it's not related to comics so I don't want people to know about it?

Can I have yet another stupid question? What exactly is Instagram? I thought it was only for people to share their mobile photos ran through that "old school" filter... Do people post comics there too? Does it work similarly to Twitter or Tumblr?

[Chiper1811]

@fanyart Instagram is exactly that - a photo sharing medium. I use instagram a lot, and I really enjoy discovering many eye candies from other people's accounts. In term of self promotion, I don't think it works as well as facebook or twitter in regards to driving traffic to your website, but it's great in terms of getting your name out there and if you're a professional artist, to connect to brands you're hoping to work with in the future. There are artists out there, for example, who drew a character wearing/using a particular brand or product and tag the brand's official instagram account.(like this lady here) The deal with instagram is you have to use the proper hash tag (#) to promote your work out there, as a lot of people trying to find new photos by exploring/clicking the hash tag. Usually after I set up my facebook and other social media, I will go to instagram and post a cropped version of my comics strip with a note saying that interested viewer can click on the link to the full version of the comics strip on my profile (sadly instagram doesn't allow linking from the post). If you're interested how it looks like, here's my instagram account: https://instagram.com/veronika_tpconfetti/

[fanyart]

Thank you so much, @Chiper1811 for explaining it to me! You really helped me a lot, I think I'm starting to get the gist of it It looks a bit complicated though, so I'll stick with Twitter for now (I don't really care about "getting my name out there", I just follow what readers and other creators seem to like >.> ) I'm really glad I now know what Instagram is though, so that I can jump on the Instagram train whenever I have time

[Chiper1811]

No worries! However, even if you decide not to post anything on Instagram, it is still an inspiring social media as a lot of artists upload their stuff there

[vsock]

This thread is so incredibly useful. Thanks for sharing it :'D

[kambreapratt]

I have not used it but I have friends that swear by it.

[avalonmao]

This is honestly so helpful xD At least I don't have to frequent the same deviantart journals over and over again.
Not that they're unhelpful per se but this seems to have new information and I am #1 fan of that ngl

[michaelson]

This thread is so incredibly useful. Thanks for sharing it :'D

Glad it helped

Is there also a way to prevent those "activity" posts from showing up on the page in the first place? Like... if I "liked" something to help a friend but it's not related to comics so I don't want people to know about it?

I believe there is a way to disable that in your settings page, which you can access by clicking on the small gear icon on the upper right hand corner. There should be a way to not showcase what activities such as liking that you're engaging in on Facebook

Is it better to set up a Facebook account using the name of your comic/strip and set up a page for that, use a personal account and create a separate page for ones comic or some other combination?

I think it's dependent on what you're trying to accomplish. For some creators such as Yuumei, it makes more sense for her to create a facebook page dedicated to her since she launches a bunch of different projects and routinely artwork unrelated to her comics work. On the other hand, there are creators such as Samantha W. who created The Gamercat facebook page. This page is more geared towards branding the series rather than herself as a creator. There are various approaches and each one has their pros and cons.

You sort of have to step back and ask what kind of content you're generating and whether you want to push your content as the brand or push yourself as the brand.

[fanyart]

I believe there is a way to disable that in your settings page, which you can access by clicking on the small gear icon on the upper right hand corner. There should be a way to not showcase what activities such as liking that you're engaging in on Facebook

I see... >>gotta try that right now>> Thank you so much for helping me! And others too :3