Why don't social media ads work well for selling art?

Social media ads generally don’t work effectively for art and photography businesses. Over ten to fifteen years of observation, not a single artist or photographer who started advertising with social media ads was still running those ads a year later. The reason is simple: they can’t get the ads to pay off or be effective. Everyone is scrolling past content at 100 miles an hour on social platforms, creating an extremely competitive visual landscape. Even when you get metrics like ‘reached 25,000 accounts,’ the actual results are typically minimal - maybe two likes on a post with no real engagement or sales. The conventional approach of boosting posts or running Facebook and Instagram ads asking people to buy work simply doesn’t generate results for most creatives.

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Asked by artists considering social media advertising · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2024-06-13