Welcome to the Boroondara Creative Network. My name is Bridget and I'm from Boroondara Arts.

I acknowledged that Traditional Owners as original Custodians of this land, including the Wurundjeri in the Northern part of our city and pay my respects to the Elders past and present; and to Elders from other communities who may be viewing this today.

Today, we're excited to present this online creative network session to you with Janine Hendry from the Guild of Objects. The Guild of Objects do some amazing work with mentoring creators and providing advice to them about how they can generate income from their artistic practice.

In today's presentation, Janine will be discussing the world of social media. After this presentation, you're invited to continue the conversation with Janine and others from the network. The Guild of Objects and Boroondara Arts will be hosting an online conversation on Saturday, the 8th of August from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM.

We'd love for you to join in and to do so you can email me [email protected].

So we hope you enjoy the presentation and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Hi, everyone. It's Janine from the Guild of Objects. I'm here today to talk to about social media and, what a perfect time to talk about social media, whilst we're all in isolation in Melbourne. Social media is one of those topics that we all often feel like we know a little bit about, but maybe not a lot about.

And I think part of the reason we feel like that is that we often don't make the leap over from looking at social media from a consumer perspective, to a business perspective. So most of us use social media on a daily, weekly, um, basis. Yep. But we often do it or don't look at it in terms of how other people might be looking at our own social media.

So if you're looking at using social media in your creative business, yep - you've got to start thinking about it from a consumer, um a consumer perspective. So that's, that's the first and very important thing. And if we start looking at it from a business perspective, then one of the things that you have to consider is, well, "What am I trying to achieve with social media?"

Because it's not a matter of just doing social media for the sake of just of just doing it. Everyone else was doing it. So they thought I should do it. You need to have a really specific objective. And those key objectives can be to build brand awareness. So you might be wanting to build your brand if you’re an artist.

Or you’re a, um, musical performer or a dance performer. Yeah. You might simply be wanting to build a specific brand. Alternatively, you might have an objective, which is specifically about what would say driving sales or driving business. You want to sell more of your art. You want to get more people to your performance.

Yeah, quite different objectives. And therefore, what and how you achieve those objectives will also be quite different. The final objective might be something like building up your own reputation as an artist, as a performer. Yeah. Why would you want to do that? That's going to be important if you're applying for grants, for example, and you want to build up specifically your profile.

So. Switch from a consumer to a business perspective and then identify what your objectives are. You all need to make sure you're operating your social media platforms, your Instagram, your Facebook, your Pinterest, your LinkedIn on business platforms. So specifically Facebook and Instagram will have both personal platforms and business platforms.

If you are not on a business platform. You can change your account over from personal to business and you need to do that right now. So that's, that's the important thing too - an important thing to understand something that you can do immediately. So you figured out what your objective is. You've checked and made sure you've got, and you're operating off a business platform.

And then need to think about the platforms themselves, because they all have different audiences and their audiences do different things on those platforms. So you need to align what you're using, the platform you're using with your audience, with your objective. So by necessity, you've now got to think about who your market is, who are your audience?

Who is it that you're trying to achieve? So do something for me now, write down three or four things that you know about your audience, who's buying your work. Who's coming to your performances. Who are you trying to attract? And yes, you can write down the kind of the demographic stuff, how old they are, where do they live?

What do they do? Maybe something about their education. But in reality, that doesn't tell us a lot about the people themselves. What we're really interested in here is what motivates these people to buy your art, to come to your performances. That's what we're really interested in.

Why do we need to know that? Because the more we know about who your audience actually is, the more you can actually target your, um, social media to those audiences. Yeah. So write down what you know, think about it in terms of their, their, as I said, their demographic criteria, but also really think about what motivates them. Then you need to start thinking about, well, is the audience that I've got now, the people that are coming to my performances, buying my art, are they the people that I necessarily want in the longer term, are they the people that are going, that are really going to help me to grow my business. Yeah. So. Is who you've got now, the people you want in the future, once you've identified that and identified who you want to be, and you've described them and written a profile, think about what social media you're going to use.

Facebook is fantastic. Facebook is one of those tools that you're going to get generally more engagement with then what you get with Instagram. Yeah, but who's using Facebook. The main person that's using Facebook are women over 30, sorry, women over 55. Yep. And they're using it. What do you think to stalk their kids and their grandkids and to communicate with their friends pretty evenly split between men and women but a much older demographic.

Younger people, those under 25 deserting Facebook completly, most of them don't even have a Facebook account. Now you might think, Oh, maybe women over 55 aren't necessarily my target audience. That's okay. You can still use it, but you know, if that's the case, you'll, you'll flip over to something like Instagram.

Who's using Instagram. It's much more urban, um, population and they're generally much lower age, um, demographic age wise, they're between 15 and 35. Yeah, but they're not as engaged as the Facebook reader user. So the Facebook user is likely to look at the picture, read your post, um, exchange, send off, um, share your post.

Whereas the Instagram user is not going to spend as much time looking at each individual posts. You also need to consider other forms of social media. Pinterest. Yeah - if you're an artist, do you have a Pinterest account? You don't need to be as active on, um, Pinterest, but it's something that's, that's good to set up and good to have.

What about LinkedIn is a LinkedIn profile and, and working with the business community and professionals going to be more aligned with your target, your, your market. What about Snapchat? Yep. It's it's the much younger audience, 13 to 20, but remember the kids that are using Snapchat now are going to grow and they're going to get older.

Is Snapchat something that you would consider using? So here's the thing. Think about your objectives. What are you trying to achieve with social media? Think about your audience. Who are they and, and is the audience that you've got now, the audience that you really want to have.

Align those with your objectives and then the last thing that I will talk about is this issue of branding and consistency. If you're starting to look at your social media from a business perspective, rather than a consumer perspective; then you've got to think about consistency. It's no longer going to be okay to publish a random set of photographs.

You've got to think about your theme and your overall branding. And what I say to our clients are at the Guild is choose maybe four colour-ways, choose a type and style of image and be consistent with that. So that when people look at your social media page, they immediately know that it's you, because when you're looking at something like Instagram, the photograph is everything people often ask me.

Well, should I put a lot of words in there? And the answer generally is no, not really. People will be. They'll look at your image first and foremost, if the image captures. Their imagination captures their attention. They will go down and read the words, but they're not going to read an entire thesis. So image is King, be succinct and clever with your words and make sure your image actually reflects your branding.

The other thing that I'll talk about, introduce you to now, but I'll talk about with you in more depth when we meet on the 8th of August is the, um, the issue of what we call schedulers. Yeah. So you can use a scheduler for your social media, and these are tools that you can upload your social media posts in a one, and you can upload 12 months worth if you want, um, on your computer to be scheduled at a time when your audience is actually looking at your, at their posts.

So as soon as you've got a business account, and you've got a certain number of followers. You will have access to data, which will tell you who's looking at your posts and when they are looking at your posts, you can use, um, that information to help you schedule. You can still share your manually, but a schedule is actually a really useful tool.

This is a huge topic, um, I'm going to send you out some notes, which will give you a bit more, um, depth. And I really look forward to seeing you on line on the 8th of August, which is by the way, my birthday, but in the meantime, if you're in Melbourne, stay safe, tough times, but yeah, we can do this bye for now.