Deciding which social media platform to grow your audience can be tricky. This article will focus on the current mainstream ones available so you can familiarize yourself with each one and plan out what’s best for you.

Instagram

This platform’s biggest strength is that it’s already a photo sharing site, so it’s familiar with posts that have media on them such as images, videos and streams. Putting up your art there automatically gives you a personal gallery. They have options for you to make minimal edits and filters to your images so you are able to correct any mistakes or enhance some elements before sharing it to your audience. The captions consist of 2200 characters and alternate text can be applied to the images. The video format is good for short-formed content and has the option of auto captions or additions of extra text. It’s biggest weakness is a challenging algorithm that changes over time and heavy competition that can prevent your work from being seen by much people.

Twitter

Unlike Instagram, Twitter, also known as X, is a more short-form text based platform but it still gives you the option to post images and videos. The app is known for hosting communities of artists who talk about the industry and post job openings every once in a while. The limit of images that you can share per post is 4 and images can be cropped unless clicked, which can change how it’s displayed. 

Facebook

Facebook has a lot of features when it comes to posting, consisting of text, images, videos, etc. It also gives you the option to join public or private groups, which is good if you want to provide a certain niche to your audience. It’s biggest weakness as an art platform is that the layout does not prioritize photos as something to be seen on the surface and visitors would have to navigate through albums in your page to find a specific artwork, which would easily tire them. Another weakness is that it’s not as popular for art sharing due to being seen as old fashioned and more of a place to more personal actions such as keeping touch with family and real life friends.

Tiktok 

Tiktok focuses more on short-form content with clips up to 15 seconds or 3 minutes and offers a creator fund for users with at leasr 10,000 followers and 100,000 views. The demographic for users is much younger, which is why the platform is more known for less serious content but users are still able to rack up a lot of following through reusing popular audio and participating in trends.

Discord

Discord is a community and messenger based platform consisting of exclusive servers, which can also host calls through voice and video. They also have a media sharing feature for videos, images, gifs and other forms of media and can even host custom emojis depending on the server. It’s weakness is that it’s a less public platform and media can easily overlap as the app prioritizes messages. However, its communities can draw in experts to your work to critique or discuss with you.

Other platforms include Art Station, Pinterest, Twitch and many more so feel free to discover for yourself. Just be careful and make sure to treat your communities as kindly and safely as you can.