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How To Grow Your Instagram Art Account (2019)
Paul Munko • Aug 19, 2019
If you want to learn how to grow an art Instagram account in 2019, you have come to the right place! In the past few years, I have grown my own personal Instagram account to over 25,000 followers through nothing but organic reach and engagement, and I am here to help you learn how to do the same.
Picking your niche
First things first, you have to figure out what kind of artwork you plan on producing and sharing with the world. Are you going to be doing classical oil paintings? Maybe some anime or manga design? Whatever you choose, make sure you stick with it! People are much more likely to follow pages and creators who have a consistent theme and aesthetic throughout the majority of their work. If someone follows you for your drawings of a puppy, they may not be too thrilled to see your painting of a skull the next day!
Staying consistent
As I said, people prefer to see consistency in your work. Now I am not saying you shouldn’t always push to evolve your artwork on Instagram, but it should always (for the most part) be an evolution into a similar style and aesthetic that you started with.
Not only is this important to keep your Instagram followers interested and engaged, but it is also important for you as an artist to work on developing an instantly recognizable style that is unique to you and your vision.
On Instagram, you want people to be able to recognize your work if it is shared, featured, or even to call out imposters who may try to steal your artwork and pass it off as their own. If a person who knows your work can see a brand new piece and confidently say “Oh look, another drawing by so and so!” you have done a good job at building your aesthetic and as a result, building your brand.
Post frequently
The Instagram algorithm is a constantly changing beast, and sometimes it may seem impossible to keep up with all of the new demands required to be featured and potentially go viral. However, one thing that will always be a beacon of light shining from your account to Instagram’s lens is frequent quality posting.
There is a reason I bring up quality, and that is because it is an unfortunately tight line to walk between frequent quality posts and what Instagram deems to be spam. This is especially important to consider if you are a new account on the platform because if they see a brand new page posting the same thing over and over again you can potentially be blacklisted, or in more extreme cases have your account deleted entirely.
The general rule of thumb I follow is to post one new, quality piece of artwork daily. While as of late I have been posting a bit less frequently (life does get in the way sometimes) I can confidently say I would not be where I am right now if it weren’t for nearly 2 years of posting drawings 350 out of the 365 days in a year.
The more work you are able to produce and draw attention to, the more likely you are to have at least one of those pieces picked up by the algorithm and featured on Instagram’s highly sought after explore page. While the explore page may not offer the same incredible leap of growth that it used to, it is still an incredibly important goal to strive for. Think about it, every time you post a new high-quality piece of art, your chances to be featured increase!
Optimize your hashtags
I can’t even begin to explain how shocked I am when I see people on Instagram neglecting to use one of it’s earliest and most important features, hashtags!
Finding the right keywords may seem a bit intimidating at first, but luckily there are free tools like
this
that make keyword searching and organizing a breeze.
I would typically suggest using a few large hashtags and a few smaller, more specific hashtags when creating your tag list. This is an important part of Instagram keyword optimization because it allows your post to “piggyback” off of the more niche tags while potentially giving you enough engagement to be pushed in the broader tags that could REALLY give your artwork the boost it so desperately needs!
Sound confusing? Let me explain a little further.
As you can see in the screenshot above, #art has over 500 MILLION posts and counting. Think it’s going to be hard to get featured here? Yeah, it will be. It’s even difficult for accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers to be featured here! People are posting under #art hundreds of times per minute. The chance of your specific post sticking out is unfortunately slim to none.
So how could you make it more likely for yourself to get featured on these insanely popular hashtag explore pages?
Piggybacking of course!
Check this out, while the #art tag has over 500 million tags, #darkartwork only has 57 thousand! Think about how much easier it will be for you to get your artwork featured on Instagram’s “Top” tags page for this one instead! This is where the piggybacking comes into play.
Since #darkartwork has a much lower volume of posts being pumped into the hashtag at a time, your post will hang around under the “recent” page for a lot longer. This means more people will have the opportunity to see your artwork and in turn, may even get you onto the top page of this smaller hashtag!
So what does ranking on smaller tags have to do with getting featured on bigger ones? Easy! You are more likely to have a post go viral within a smaller tag’s community, and once it starts to pick up momentum there it has the chance to be featured on the larger hashtags you used because of its already massive spike in organic engagement! You “piggyback” off of the smaller tags to get the numbers you need to be pushed to the top of the more difficult and inclusive topical hashtags.
Now I understand, dark artwork may not really be your thing, but I promise just about every artistic genre has its own dedicated hashtags on Instagram. It is all just a matter of finding them! The best thing to do when looking for specific hashtags is to see what other people in your niche are using. Stealing artwork is never okay, but snagging a few hashtags is totally fine and a surefire way to get your art seen by the people who you know are already interested in what it is you are trying to create!
Collaborate with other artists in your niche
Last but not least, always make yourself available to collaborate with fellow artists on the platform. I’m sure you have seen a countless number of “shout out for shout out” posts on Instagram, and essentially collaborating is a less desperate way of accomplishing the exact same thing.
If you do a collaborative piece with an artist on social media, it would be safe to assume both of you will be posting the finished product on your pages individually. By doing this, you effectively open yourselves up to a brand new audience on the opposite person’s feed.
Why is this important? Well, let’s say you have 1,000 followers and the person you collaborated with has 1,000 followers as well. Since both of you posted the work and tagged each other in the descriptions of each post, you have effectively doubled your potential audience through organic outreach alone. Your followers will follow them, their followers will follow you, and all of the new followers can be stoked about finding a super cool new artist to stay up to date with. Everybody wins!
I hope whoever reads this has found my insight helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or message me on my Instagram account @colorfulfilth.
I look forward to hearing your success stories! Feel free to share this article with any of your friends who may also be looking for ways to improve their artwork’s social media presence.
Cheers!
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Paul Munko
Paul is an internationally published artist and designer who goes by the alias "Colorful Filth". He is known mostly for his vibrant and monstrous artwork that can be seen
here on instagram or on his official website
colorfulfilth.com.
