 Well hello and welcome to this week's video where today I'm discussing Pinterest or Instagram to market your art. Which one is better? Which one should you be doing? Do you find yourself wondering which platform should you be on to get the best out of marketing your art? You know time is really precious as an artist and I'm sure that for most people watching this you'd rather be making and doing and creating your art than spending time doing all this marketing. So maybe you find that you're posting on Instagram you're not getting as many likes as you used to you're not getting as many followers the number kind of stays the same week in week out and you find yourself thinking well if I'm going to be using this time each week I want to get a little bit more traction. What should I be doing? Is Instagram even the right strategy for me? Now if you're wondering how to get the most out of Instagram check out my previous video because I have talked about that and what to do specifically for 2022. But what about Pinterest I hear you cry doesn't that just take hours and hours of my time? Don't I need to be pinning 10 or 20 times a day? Well if you're not sure about Pinterest specifically I've also done a video recently on that as well up here that today it's really important that we look at which one of those is going to work best for you. Well hello and welcome and welcome back to my channel my name is Sophie Mahia and I love to help artists set up and grow a profitable art business doing what they love. On this channel we talk about all things art business related so if that's something you need to help you make a living from your art don't forget to subscribe to my channel and look out for all those regular videos that I post every week on a Wednesday. So the very first thing you want to be thinking about of course is where are your audience hanging out. Now we are seeming here that you've worked out who your ideal audience is and who that preferred customer is and if you'd like a bit of help make sure to check out my free resource my ideal customer avatar worksheet which there's a direct link to below this video. In that worksheet we have several pages that you can follow out and get into a real deep dive with exactly who your customer is and I will also put a link to the video where you can find out how to find those ideal customers as well. So the first thing you always have to do is think about where are they already hanging out. Are they already on the Instagram or are they already on Pinterest. Now you'll likely have the answer to that once you've completed that worksheet and you've done a deeper dive into who they are. So once you've got that piece of information then you really have to balance it out with well where are you prepared to show up on a regular basis. We know that marketing and social media particularly loves consistency right. So there's no point you saying oh my goodness me my audience I think my audience is on Instagram but I absolutely hate being there because the chances of they're not just going to be on one platform they'll be in a few other places as well. So you have to weigh up you have to find that balance between where's the audience and where are you prepared to put in your time energy and effort. Now what if you discover by the end of today's video that your audience are actually on Pinterest and perhaps you're not really sure how that works. So would you be prepared to move your strategy over Pinterest. I imagine you probably would if you knew that's where your audience were hanging out. So that's the first thing you've got to consider. Where are they already because ideally unless you absolutely hate that platform that's where you want to be showing up. The second thing and equally important to consider are your marketing goals. What are your marketing goals specifically for this year. Are you planning to grow your mailing list. Are you really wanting way more traffic to your shop online shop or your website. Or are you looking to build engagement build awareness. Just get your brand and your work out there and actually maybe gain some followers. What is it you're actually specifically doing. You're wanting to make sales a particular number of sales. It's important with marketing of course that you have a marketing goal. Now I have a recent marketing video that I'll put a link to as well below this video so that you can really get an idea of what you need to do for a simple marketing plan for this year as well. So let's do a little bit of a pros and cons exercise because I don't know about you. They're both visual and personally I love them both. But the reality is that we only have 24 hours in a day and if we're going to do one of them well we're likely going to do one of them well and not both of them. Unless of course you have other people who can help you. So let's look at Pinterest first. What are the real pros of being on Pinterest. Well number one it's way more of a search engine than a social media platform. What does that mean. That means that people are already on the platform looking for things. Pinterest is a place that can turn your lookers into buyers. There are people looking for inspiration but they're also looking for things to buy. So in a sense it's a platform with already an audience actually in there looking. You can use search engine optimization so you can put in keywords to help people find your content. One thing that I really like is if you're already creating content. So like myself you make YouTube videos or you write blog articles or perhaps you're super out there and you're doing a podcast. You know whatever you're doing on a regular basis you can create a series of pins for that one piece of content. Right. You can keep that one piece of content alive and going on multiple different pins. For me that's a real benefit. What's the other thing I really love about Pinterest as a real real pro. And that is of course that each pin has a clickable link. And that is really huge isn't it. Specifically when we're going to weigh up in a minute with Instagram. So you can easily create that pin. And of course when you have pins that actually take you direct to your products. So perhaps you've got an online store with Shopify. And each pin is a product and people can click on it and just buy it straight away. That makes things really easy. Imagine then that you promote that pin. Suddenly you've got a little ad running. People see it and buy it. And perhaps it's something they've already collected they aspire to. It's really something that they want in their home. So that's for me some of the key benefits of Pinterest. Of course there are many others as well. For example when you do pin content to your various boards. It stays there visual all the time. There isn't a kind of that vertical feed where things just you know fall away and you have to scroll down. You can look and you can sort according to different topics. So somebody just wants to know about one topic they'll look on that board. And of course on Instagram for example there is no way of sorting the content is just one big feed. We'll come on to the pros of that in a minute. What about the cons of Pinterest? Well you know what I'm going to say initially. There's quite a bit of time to create all the different pins and kind of get that all going right. Inevitably right now as you'll see by watching that other Pinterest video that Pinterest loves fresh content. So that means new images a new pin. So you need to be constantly creating. So that can be quite time consuming. But one of the other pros that I didn't really mention is it is a massive traffic driver to your website. So Pinterest is known to actually send lots of lots and lots and lots of visitors far more than probably many other platforms if not any other platforms out there. So whilst you are having to create content and you are having to put that time into it. I feel like what you're going to get out of your time it might just be you might just get a little bit more out of that time that's what I feel personally. Imagine you create a blog right you put the blog on the website. You create say three five pins for that one blog and you pin those and you find that people are looking clicking going reading the blog looking clicking going reading the blog. I think that's quite it's quite active. It feels quite like an active platform and the other pros are just going back to the pros of Pinterest that I personally feel as an artist just to sum it all up. If you are like me believe it or not an introvert and actually you find it quite a challenge to constantly get in front of the video. And I'm imagining right now you're sitting there thinking you can't be an introvert Sophie well I am an introvert. This is a massive energy for me to make the videos all the time. And when we look at Instagram in a minute we'll see that a large strategy behind getting your Instagram growing this year is likely going to involve you being in front of the camera. So I find that this is a really good strategy for somebody who really likes to do the back end stuff. You're going to create some pins the pin to the content that you've made already and you can schedule them. So there's a phenomenal app the tailwind app. Again there's a link below the video for you can go and have a free trial and try out tailwind. It's a phenomenal scheduler. So when you use a tool like tailwind to actually schedule your pins it will give you all sorts of other analytical information. Best time to post like best port board to put it all in. Lots and lots and lots of information which is going to save you time. So when you use a tool like that it can seem a little bit easier. Alright let's talk a little bit about Instagram. So Instagram as we know one of the benefits is you've got a beautiful looking feed. So as a creative and you're posting your work people can scroll down and they can very quickly and easily get a feel for your type of work especially as a two or three D artist. Whereas when you land on on Pinterest you can see the boards but you have to click in a bit further to have a look around and you might have pinned other people's things to those boards. Whereas Instagram the feed it's all your work people can look down they can see the pins they can see what's going on and they probably fairly instantly and quickly get an idea of what and who you are like as an artist. So that's one of the definite benefits that's one of the pros. The other one I feel is that you have lots and lots of different post options. You do have some options on Pinterest I feel like there's just a few more options that just make it quick and easy on Instagram. So you can create those carousels that look great. You've got reels. You've got stories. You've got going live. You've got the little highlight covers. Now you might say to me a lot of that is available on Pinterest and more and more of it is for sure. But I feel like your variety is your thing and you like to just change it up every day that Instagram definitely would be something that you would love. You know another pro about Instagram is the fact you can be very in the moment. So it's very easy to tell your day to day story and you know that people go on there and they look down the feed and they're seeing stuff. They can different feeds as well. So they can look on the main feed. They can start looking for different people. They can look just at reels. So there's a few different things and ways to explore and it's quite easy to get in front of a new audience from Instagram. And of course another pro is you can link it to your Facebook shop. You can link it again to your online store and again people can buy. So you can set up a shop. So much like Pinterest. This is another pro. You can also have shoppers on there. But I feel the difference really is that there's already an audience actively looking for inspiration and things to buy on Pinterest whereas I feel on Pinterest whereas I feel over on Instagram. We kind of just looking and you know people get bored very easily on Instagram. So if you are posting the same content you're going to find you're going to lose followers. So that's one of the cons on Instagram is that if you stop posting on a regular basis you can drop right off out really really quickly. Whereas I feel you've got much more longevity with your pins than you do with your Instagram posts. If you get into a nice rhythm of posting and engaging and then suddenly you stop for a while it can really be hard to build that back up again. So that's a definite con. The other thing I feel with Instagram personally I feel it's more active in order to really play the game and get the algorithm working and liking what you're doing. You do need to put lots of video. You need to do the reels. You need to do video of some sort. And of course it's going to be easier potentially if you are in front of the camera. So if you like being in front of the camera you're saying hey come into my studio seeing what I'm doing or you're teaching or perhaps you have a YouTube video and you want to also make an Instagram video then those things go really really well together. So if you're somebody that likes to be in front of camera and likes to be enrolling people in your story and what you're doing it's very easy to get people to follow you that way. So I feel like telling the story and being involved in a day-to-day activity of what people are up to. What you're up to as an artist is much easier on Instagram. The story is quite well established and although we have idea pins which is our sort of equivalent to story the story on Instagram is something you really can literally follow what people are doing all day long which as an artist and a creative I think is a real plus. People do want to see what we're doing behind the scenes. They want to see where we are you know where are we getting our inspiration from like are we in the studio where are we from day-to-day. So Instagram's definitely got that. What are the pros we've talked a little bit about it's very very quick and easy to fall off. It can take a lot of your time a bit like Pinterest and it's definitely definitely I feel like I said very active it's a very active platform and I just note recently that quite a few people that I've spoken to are opting out of Instagram because they're saying it's taking too much of their energy and this for me is the interesting thing. As I feel that Pinterest it doesn't have to take your energy takes some time to plan and schedule but I feel that with Instagram you need to show up much more energetically you need to be there you need to be present it's ongoing. So that for me are the real kind of differences I suppose at the end of the day it's going to come down to your preference it's going to come down to where is that audience what are you prepared to do it really comes down to your marketing goals one of the major cons of Instagram I still feel is that on the post there is no clickable link for sure you can now send people to the bio and you've got a clickable link on a story but somehow that is a big piece that's missing and maybe once that has happened the comparison you know will be a bit even even but at the moment we very much you create the post you create whatever type of post you're creating on Instagram but there's still you've got to get people to take action to click through unless of course it's tagged to a product whereas Pinterest every pin has a clickable link to go somewhere do you sense that I have a favorite over the two if you think I have could you pop in the comments below which one you think personally is my favorite because I love to hear and I'd love to know which one you're favoriting at the moment too are you thinking of switching are listening and thinking oh god Pinterest sounds like way too much hard work I don't need to drive traffic to my blog I just need to show up tell my story post what I'm doing keep the whole thing moving which case I'm on Instagram and I know my audience is too or are you listening and thinking hmm I actually quite like the idea of creating lots of pins per piece of content scheduling them way ahead of time I can perhaps be offline a lot more it'll be a little bit more automated and I can perhaps spend more time actually doing the creative thing like I say let me know which one you prefer which one you're doing and if you have any questions over where your audiences don't forget to pop those below as well if you've loved this content and don't forget to consider subscribing to my channel giving the video if you video a like as well and I will look forward to seeing you on the next one keep creative bye