[bad advice column] how do i get followers

Hi! Thanks for supporting me on Patreon. I'm starting a new series of posts to lock my secret advice behind a paywall (and to test this stuff on a smaller audience before pivoting my entire career to become a self help guru)

As of this writing, I have around 156k followers on twitter, and about 107k followers on instagram. Some may consider this a lot of followers, and so I definitely know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I'm writing this down because I've mostly gone through my social media career on intuition, and I kind of want to write it down to see if I can help anyone else get the attention they (probably) deserve. Pay it forward and such. Except not, because you're paying me to see this.

Keep in mind: getting lots of followers will probably take a long time. Even if you're an amazing artist, it can take months or years to gather an audience. Be patient. Once you have a decent sized audience it's easier to grow even more as more people share your stuff.

Yeah, yeah, so how do I get lots of followers

0. Have fun

Are you having fun drawing? If not, why even bother getting lots of followers? Figure out why you want to draw first, and then come back.

1. Have a clean gallery

Unless a potential follower already knows you from somewhere else, they'll look through your media tab or gallery to see if you post stuff they care about. If they have to scroll through dozens of memes and reaction images and Final Fantasy XIV screenshots to get to any art, they'll lose interest. Potential follower lost.

2. Post stuff people care about

Not everyone has to care about the stuff you post, just the people you want following you. To get lots of followers you'll probably want to have some kind of general appeal, though.

3. Post regularly

People like to follow people who post often. Maybe not too often. But the more art you have, the more likely someone's gonna see it and share it around. People always talk about how getting followers is all luck, well more posting = more preparation + more opportunity = more luck.

4. Improve your content over time

People get bored easily. People like to see potential and growth. You want to grow as an artist too don't you?

5. Have fun with others

Going back to "having fun". This is arguably the most important thing about growing on social media. Social media is social (duh). Follow people who draw things you like, share stuff you liked seeing, comment about how much you like things, and enjoy. Art is way more fun when you're sharing the enjoyment of art with others. Who knows, you might make a friend or two, and learning and growing with other artists at your level is part of growing on social media too. I've found artist discord servers have been very good for this kind of thing. However, this doesn't mean you should expect people to become friends with you just because you interact with them. Also, don't be a weirdo.

5. Know how to use the social media platform

Twitter works differently than instagram. It's heartbreaking to see artists posting their art with 30 hashtags like they're on instagram, as if anyone searches for #digitalartist or #fanart. It looks ugly and there's zero benefit to it and you look like a twitter newbie. Pick one or at most two hashtags if it's a community or fandom tag or something. But on Instagram, hashtags are absolutely necessary because people actually follow hashtags, and people's Explore feeds show things related to the person's interests, and that's the primary way people are going to discover your work.

6. Post when your audience is awake

That means don't post at 2 am, unless most of your audience is up at 2 am. You'll want people to see the thing you post, and they won't if it gets buried under 3 thousand other posts by the time your audience wakes up.

7. Don't fixate on numbers

Accept that sometimes a post won't do as well as you expect, and move on to the next post. Easier said than done, I know. People want to see you having fun with art, though, not constant whining about how you're under-appreciated.

If you're saying "Wait a minute, this is super basic stuff that everyone knows!", then congratulations! You have what it takes to be a twitter super star. Now on to the actual content.

Part 2: The Content

I find in general the very popular twitter artists display any one or more of these combined with consistency of posting.

1. amazing technique (this artist is a true master of their craft and I want to see more)

2. amazing and original character designs (this artist makes work that is so creative and interesting, I am inspired)

3. relatable or interesting storytelling (this artist's work has a compelling narrative and evokes personal feelings or empathy, I care about these characters or situations)

4. horny (horny)

5. some kind of cult leader (a special magnetic personality that just attracts certain people i guess)

6. active in fandom (good art that features established characters from some other work that already has a fan community around it, I am a member of this fanbase too)

These are fairly self explanatory. Some will have more general appeal than others. Particularly content related to 4 and 6 will get you a particular type of follower, who may not stick around if you want to switch to some other content, so you might want to sprinkle in the other categories of art.

"Wait a minute, does that mean I have to be good at stuff"

Well, sure, you have to give people a reason to follow you. Obviously you don't have to be the best in the world (just look at yours truly (΄◞ิ۝◟ิ‵)), but having some basic skill won't hurt here.

Now the "How" is the thing everyone has to learn and go through themselves and there are entire courses and colleges and degrees about how to make actually appealing art, and it's all very subjective to your own tastes too, so I'm not going to cover that here. Plus I'm desperately trying to get good here too. Naoki Saito has a lot of cool YouTube videos on this subject as far as anime style art goes and I've found them to be pretty useful knowledge (although I don't personally recommend certain other parts of his social media presence nowadays :/)

Anyway I hope this was insightful as far as what I think about when I think about social media stuff. I'll probably write more (I want to get better at writing long blog posts), so you can give me your comments, questions, and suggestions below if you want me to write about a particular subject.