18/11/2019
Following Mary Agnew-Barker's illuminating talk a few week's back, Courtauld student Jason Tang has summarised some of the main themes with his article entitled: 'Deep into the Art World through Social Media'. For those that were unfortunate to miss Mary's talk, have a read for some of her advice on 'Leveraging Social Media in the Art World':
The advent of the social network platform has brought people closer in an unprecedented way. In this session, the Courtauld Business of Art Society invited Mary Agnew-Barker to deliver a delicate talk titled ‘Leveraging Social Media in the Art World’. Mary has a prolific career, specialising as a senior digital media strategist with experience in both Europe and Asia. As one of the leading figures at Pelham Communications, she has been responsible for implementing extensive social media and digital marketing strategies with the aim of creating audience engagement across all clients. Her experience, therefore, was clearly reflected through her talk about how social media plays such a crucial role in the art world.
The art world had long ceased to become a secret garden for artists and intellectuals. However, its earlier engagement with the general public was questionable until the rise of social media that leveraged this situation.
Like many other industries, or perhaps unlike any other, the art world has been making the most of social media to engage with the public audience, sharing their latest news, advertising events, exhibitions and selling related products. Mary started out by introducing several key online platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn along with their user counts and prominent features. In her talk, Instagram, despite its smaller user base (1 billion monthly users) compared to Facebook (2 billion monthly users), is highly favoured by the art world due to its emphasis on visual representation. Features such as Feed, Stories and IGTV allow art accounts to make their contents more visually orientated.
The talk carried on with the introduction of internet terms, namely 'lurker', 'conversion rate', 'click-through rate' and 'impression'. Mary particularly stressed the necessity of understanding Impressions, which refers to the total amount of times your content is shown to social media users. It is important to acknowledge that this Impression is dictated by an Instagram algorithm and that the online marketing approach of an art business account is, more often than not, revolving around the way Instagram works.
In order to gain more Impressions, there are three main aspects that need to be taken into consideration, namely 'relationship', 'interest' and 'timeliness'.
First of all, an art business account needs to prioritize on engagements such as comments, likes and shares in order to garner more visibility. At the same time, it needs to provide interest with the aligning accounts. Lastly, it needs to keep track of the new posts as they often appear first on the timeline. The approach to these aspects is to post more often, especially when your audience is watching, make use of the hashtag, encourage your followers to turn on notifications, run contents and conversation.
Pushing through Impressions also means that the content needs to be visually engaging, which is where the technical aspects come into play. An art business account is encouraged to form its own visual identity. Therefore, its Instagram profile needs to be curated well so that it would provide a clean and aesthetic viewing experience to the audience. Quality event shots, archive imagery and published materials should all be considered wisely before they end up on the Instagram feed. In terms of content, it should be refreshing, but at the same time not lacking in meaning and point of view. There could be a diverse format of content, namely podcast, video making, art parody or even semi-documentary of a decade long project, such as James Turrell’s Roden Crater project (). The introduction of IGTV and Stories further help art business account to translate their works and experiences into a more daring content.
In Mary’s vocabulary, popular art accounts on Instagram can be separated into multiple so-called genres. There are indie artists such as Banksy (), whose content and artworks resonate well with the people’s interest as they are largely anti-establishment. Then, there are big galleries such as Gagosian (), White Cube () and Hauser & Wirth () or major art institutes such as MOMA ( museumofmodernart) and British Museum () that are widely followed by the public. These galleries and institutions are trying to break away from the stone-cold, “corporation image” by embracing social media. They strive to create a more personalized image, and when the public audience look into their Instagram Feeds and Stories, they would feel the same friendliness as one would find from a friend’s. This is further enhanced by the using of emoji and stickers, which served the purpose of an icebreaker.
Finally, there are art collectors or curators who would share their personal thoughts, thus bring a deeper and more sentimental look into the art world. These art influencers, however, should not be classified as the typical Instagram content creators as they are less driven by advertisement revenue and some of them are tied to art institutions.
Certainly, the heavy engagement with social media is successful in the art world. Mary, however, stressed that an art business account must take precaution in regard to legal matters. This form of risk management includes engaging with toxic comments that involve sensitive issues such as race, gender and religion. It is encouraged to have a senior decision-maker to estimate the situation and come to an eventual conclusion of how to react.
Overall, Mary delivered a refreshing talk which allows the audience to gain more insight into curating an art business account. It shows that the art world is not falling behind in the embracement of social media and that this ever-increasing use of social media platform would bring the audience closer than ever to the art world, be it the western hemisphere or the rest of the world.
