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Jan 2019

So, this time i'm not asking for tips and tricks, instead i wanted to share a tiny bit of my poor knowledge of instagram with all the people in this community who might be interested in growing their fanbase :smiley: before starting i'm gonna say that i really don't have many followers myself and i know some buddies here who could be of even greater help rather than me (xD) but after being in many instagram groups, making researches and experimentation i think i can give some at least basic tips for those who might struggle a bit with using this social to increase their followers and readers :slight_smile:

GENERAL TIPS AND IMPORTANT THINGS:

1)Be consistent: try to only post quality pictures of your works rather than focusing on quantity. Some might think that always posting the same type of images could end up being boring for some followers but it's important to have a clean and sort of like aesthetic feed (?) as long as you just post, for example, about your webcomic panels and wips it will work, but don't mix them up with photographs of other things if you want to look consistent ^^

2) Be active: instagram, as every other social, it's made for connecting people with same interests and communicate with each other. So one thing that i've learned is to always leave some likes to other artists and comment whenever you really like their work! Basically supporting other people.

3) Post a lot: like, it's not about posting every single day...but i've heard that reach more people it's suggested to post at least 3 times a week and always at the same time :slight_smile: generally the advice is not to feel rushed and post something as soon as you finished but to wait untill the right time!

4) Appealing Bio: when people are interested in your drawings they will surely go check your instagram page, so i think it's important to write a Bio that better fits and describe who you are and what you provide to your followers. Also, instagram has a particular eye for the use of emoji in your bio, so you can try adding a few of them for a more graphic communication that will spice it up little bit! :3

5) Hashtags: this is probably the most complicated thing. You have to find the right hashtags that will make your drawing pop out to the target audience you're trying to get noticed by :slight_smile: so if you do webcomics the most used could be #webcomics, #comicart, #comiccharacter, #comicstyle, #webtoon...and so on! You can look through the correlated hashtags as well to see what works better for your visibility.

And...that's basically all XD i don't know if these tips will be of help to someone or you'll be interested in knowing them, but since we're all trying to get noticed for our hard work i thought about sharing some generic tips that most people talks about and that work well too!

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I have another thing to add! Your username and icon are super important!!! It’s the first thing people see usually!

I almost ALWAYS click on users who have have their name as a username because it’s easy to assume they’re probably a professional. And if the icon looks like a piece of art I’m even more likely to click through. And at almost 43k followers, because I click through on so many people who fit that criteria, I usually recognize them when I see them pop up in my notifications even if I don’t follow them and sometimes I do end up following them somewhere along the line.

Yeah, thank you for remind me! Sure having one of your most well done drawings as your icon and a cool username that suggests you're an artist will recognize you as an artist much quicker! (For example my username is "Fenneckydraws".

I'm really bad at most of these, I haven't posted on IG in over a month!
I'd also say if you've got an art instagram post mostly art! If I see someone who's art I like but their feed is- photo of food, photo of dog, photo of food, art, photo of friends, photo of book I'm far less likely to follow them than if it was mostly art. Have two IG accounts if you want to post photos of your life all the time, though having the occasional photo of yourself does make people realise you're a real person!

Simple tips, but they work!
I know a lot of people who want to find out magical tips to do nothing and be popular in Instagram, but the truth is that you have to work hard and consistantly.

Is instagram helpful for getting traffic on your comics? I've never tried, so I'd be curious to see if it's worth investing some time into :slight_smile:

i also wanted to add regarding hashtags that, depending on how it fits, it can be useful to use tags related to what the image is especially ones that are active as some people do follow hashtags (for some reason?)

theres a lot of trends with tags like myoc or myoriginalcharacter, digitalart, digitalartist, traditionalart/artist. tags regarding materials or programs like procreate, paint tool sai, Photoshop, medibang paint and etc. also tagging things like reference sheets or character sheets as such can help. there's lots of examples too it just takes some digging around. also i doubt it'd hurt to make a tag for youself though knowing whats already taken can help avoid confusion (or potential conflict) in thr future.

there's probably promo tags as well though the only ones i tend to see are ones artists have associated with themselves or are fanmade in hopes of getting promoted or featured by an artist they admire. as for promotion instagram accounts im not to fond of them as i doubt theres any guarantee that it'll actually drive traffic back to you (there's already tons of repost accounts and those are an eyesore imo)

but that all i can think to add :sweat_smile:

I'm afraid of using instagram.

When i was more active, whenever i post, i mostly lost subscribers/followers/whatever they are called.

Not doing anything and no updating ,seems to do ...eh, at least i'm not losing subs lol.

There is a KICKASS app you can download on your phone called Canva1 (no 's'). It's a tool used by businesses to create quick simple graphics for posting to all kinds of social media.

Using instagram as a webcomic is a little tough. Half the time you can't even read a page there, unless you cut every panel in the process which makes for a lot of work :confused:

Before I started using Canva this is what update announcement posts for :zap:Kamiakze2:zap: looked like

JUgh, it's just so messy! You can't read it, the whole page won't even fit and there's WAY too much text in the caption area. And no emojis. For some reason people on insta love emojis??? So when I found Canva I made a quick graphic, put it over a close up of an interesting panel and...

Much better, right? Clean post, emojis because that's a thing, simple, easy to read gets the idea across without posting a whole page and the caption isn't a wall of text. We get a lot more interest this way, plus it just looks nicer.

Further. Y'all. We make comics. Like WE DO THAT. You know what people LOVE to do? Watch the process!

So post videos of you working on a panel, thumbnails for pages coming up, showcase new characters that are going to pop up and above all - show your face! People want to engage with a person, not a faceless art machine.

Now, I say all this with a giant grain of salt. My biggest issue is that I have a hard time keep up with instagram because I got so much other stuff going on. The best way I've found to combat this is to horde pictures and video and slowly trickle them out over time, rather than posting all at once. It's an ongoing journey for me, and one I'm still learning a lot on.

Perhaps a bunch of us here at Tapas should start up an Insta Pod5? Could help everyones traffic if we play our cards right!

Instagram also offers business profiles, and they no longer require a FB page to be connected to them anymore! They provide you with all kinds of stats like what days your followers are more active, busy hours (tho this isn't very useful since chronological order is gone :expressionless: ) , and more detailed stats on where your views on a post are coming from etc. It's free and worth trying imo, mostly just cause I think it's interesting - but it might help with deciding when to post and what hashtags work for you.

Also with the being active thing - commenting on others work can be a big help more than just liking. If I see someone commenting on my posts frequently I'll usually check them out. If I see someone with an icon/username that stands out to me in the comments of someone elses post - I might check them out.

Drawthisinyourstyle challenges are really popular and can help you get discovered or even featured by the artist running theirs. Stuff like inktober/huevember/mermay are also popular trends that can get more people checking out your stuff.

I had that problem too, sometimes I'd have someone follow just to unfollow a few days later or even the day they follow, it's weird, like even when I post consistently they'll leave. I usually avoid instagram for this reason because I stress out if I've lost anyone.

@kazsup and @Rootbeer_Jewels
those accounts only follow you to get a follow back. If you check out the profile of a new follower, and they only follow a few hundreds, but have 3k - 5k followers without standing out to much, they are most likely using that method and you should exspect them to unfollow in a few days.
It has nothing to do with your own account - they usually haven´t even looked at it.
A "good follow" is usually a private account, or someone doing similar artistic things as you are ^^ they are there to actually see more of your content! Please don´t let the trolls hold you back. Their buisness tactic will get them nowhere, anyway.

Thanks! I've been trying to figure out my whole instagram for a while now and that ceratinly clears some stuff up for me.

A lot of that is actually bots. Ive known a lot of people who use them to scour specific tags and what they do is they either “like” posts automatically or have it set to follow and then unfollow people who post certain tags en masse.

Its extremely shady though and its usually easy to tell when someone is using them (high following count, higher follower count with very little engagement kn their actual posts). My husband tried it out for a while and thats the only reason I know about it because I’m not particularly tech savvy.

But thats also why neither of us have ever used tags on our own posts.

Yeah, I suspected at least the follow/unfollow was automatic, but it definitely makes sense for the whole account to be a bot...
Ah, social media with all it´s lovely quirks and shady tactics. I´ve heard about similar bots on Twitter; with automatic follows and messages after follow backs, and dug up some programs out of curiousity a while back - in the end, I don´t believe that is the way to get out there haha. It´s annoying for the other users, at best...

Whoa that looks sick. If I ever decide to use insta again, I'll definitely use that app! Cropping on there was a nightmare, even for normal illustrations.

8 months later

Who flagged @oksoup ? Really? The people who keep flagging really need to have their flags removed. @ratique this is ridiculous. Please, please rethink the flag policy.

System error that was already discussed multiple times. Feel free to do a little research if you're interested in more details. This post wasn't actually flagged but hidden (His account was just all kinds of messed up for some reason). I unhid it.