ArtSites Updates

This week, Geoff and I received a great question from an artist:

I was speaking with a client of yours and she mentioned concern that these days there might not be sufficient social media integration - that she has to re-post things, e.g. on Facebook. So, she is entering things twice. Is that the case or is she missing something? It would be important for me that it be included.

While the question is rather simple, unfortunately, the answer is much more complex and complicated. :-)

Within our service, we do have ways to add social media buttons to your website.

We have alsoformatted and optimized each page on your website so that if anyone pastes a link to any page on your website, e.g. within Facebook, the post will automatically pull the image, the appropriate title, and description / content from that page.

So, we do offer a certain level of social media integration.

That said, we do not offer an automated social media posting option for the following reasons:

• Most social media websites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., actually penalize any automated posts that stem from outside, automated posting services. Here's a Facebook article where this is specifically mentioned.
  
  In other words, if we allowed you to automatically post to your social media accounts, your posts would be LESS likely to be seen by your followers.
  
  
• Also, many of the social media websites have changed their algorithms related to "organic discovery" and are primarily promoting "paid promotion" of posts to reach followers. In fact, Facebook recently announced that posts from Facebook Pages would carry less weight than posts from individuals.

While we do understand and appreciate your desire to simplify and automate your social media posting process, we also know that most social networks, in fact, penalize such practices.

Also, to provide the best exposure to you and your entire body of works, we strongly recommend that posts on social media have a link to your website. This is to encourage interested buyers / collectors to browse beyond your one post on social media. And, if this is the case, pasting a link to your webpage is a much better way to do this.

If you are simply reposting content to Facebook, anyone who stumbles across that post will only see what you have done on that social network and your efforts on your website are somewhat wasted.

As always, we simply want assure you that we are monitoring social media quite closely and how it works.

Unfortunately, what may appear to be a simple solution is not very effective or in your best interest if you want be discovered and increase your art sales.

We simply don't want to give you a false sense of "efficiency"! ;-)

We sincerely hope that this provides a little more context as to why we haven't made this option available to you.

That said, we are constantly thinking about new ways to save you time, provided they are effective and worth your while! ;-)