Transcripts
1. Introduction: For us artists, staying relevant in
social media channels can be a real challenge. The amount of time and effort that these
platforms require leave to little to no time
for creating actual art. My name is Ada and I'm
a one online artist and social media director that
has taken the time to plan, test, and document
social media tools and workflows specifically
made for artists. The solutions you'll
learn in this class are made to help artists succeed at social media
without losing creativity and valuable creation time. In this course, we'll
discuss specific challenges that artists face when it
comes to social media, along with realistic and
attainable solutions that can be applied
with the help of tools designed to take some
weight off your shoulders. In this class project, you will be creating your home social
media agenda with me on a platform called
Adobe Express. There we'll plan, edit, and schedule all of our
social media content. The solutions in
this class changed the way I grow in social
media for the better, and I am confident that
they will make a difference in the way you do
social media too. I look forward to
seeing you in my class. Now, let's go grow.
2. Project: For this class project, you will be creating your whole social media
workflow with me. First, I will walk you through how I focus on creating art, not on creating content, how to maximize the extent
to which you can use the art you already have in
your social media posts. Then I will teach you
how to repurpose, plan, and schedule your content
using Adobe Express, specifically on how to
edit using quick actions, how to use multiple pages
to speed up your work, and how to secure
consistent exposure by using the content scheduler. I strongly encourage you
to share your work in the project section below
for two main reasons. One, it helps me better support you and provide
you with feedback, and two your work and
the way you go about planning your social media can help other students as well. All you will need for this
class is your smartphone, a phone stand, your computer, and the app or website
from Adobe Express. For the class, you're
going to need to make a free user account using the link in the
class description below. The only feature we will use not available in the free version
is the content scheduler. But you can try it out
with a free trial.
3. Adobe Express: Adobe Express is the program
I use for my workflow. Therefore the program that we will be using
during this course. It is available as an app for all devices
and as a website. I am aware that there are an incredible amount
of apps out there that do similar things to what we're about to
learn in this class. But after testing
so many of them, Adobe Express is the only one I feel fits artists
and designers best. Instead of using
four different apps, I use only this one. It streamlines my work in a way I don't have to devote
more than one day a month to be present
in social media. The reason why I
use Adobe Express, as opposed to many other apps, is because of these
three main features. Here, I use just quick actions. I can trim a video,
I can resize it. I use speed change a lot because I have to speed up my
one line art drawings for them to fit
in the real time. So one of the main reasons why I use Adobe Express is
because of the quick actions. This set of quick actions
makes my life so much easier. The second reason why
I use Adobe Express instead of another app
for example Canvas, is because I can
use multi-pages, which is another feature
of Adobe Express in which we have all different
sizes of my campaign or of my social media
usage in one document. Instead of using all the
stories in one document, all the posts in one document, all the Facebook posts
in one document, all the Pinterest
in one document. I actually have everything for one post in different
sizes in one document. As you can see, I
have here vertical, I have square, and
I have horizontal. Then the third reason why
I do use Adobe Express is because it has a
content scheduler. Yes, I can use another app
for content scheduler. I can use a paid app. I can use a free app
for content scheduler, but I would have to
export my edited content or my multi-pages
to my computer, use my computer's memory in
order to store all of that and then put that into another program in
order to schedule it. With Adobe Express, I can do edit, I can do sizing, and I can do publishing
in the same app. For the class,
you're going to need to make a free
user account using the link in the class
description below. Now, without further ado, let's dive into our class.
4. Art Not Content: One of the biggest
challenges artists face when giving social
media a try is thinking they have to create content
for social media as opposed to creating art that they showcase
in social media. We tend to believe that
harping on trends is going to give us the push we need
to finally start growing. While going viral
is certainly cool, it is definitely
not sustainable. Staying on top of
trends requires the countless of hours
in the platform, adapting on the fly to changes and sometimes doing silly dances and faces you don't want to just to stay
on top of things. Think of it this way, Some items of clothing
never go out of style. They're not trendy. They're classic. Lucky for us, good
art shown well, is a classic type of
content not a trendy one because art is
inherently timeless. Bearing this in mind, the first exercise
of this class is to find all the art you
have already made. I usually look in my
phone photo gallery, my Instagram archive,
my computer, my sketchbooks, and
all around my studio. It doesn't really matter
if it's complete or not, a doodle on a napkin
or a completed piece. Step 1 is to collect. Don't worry about deciding whether you will use it or not. The important part is to
collect as much as you can. I can't stress enough how
important it is to collect work that is not necessarily
a masterpiece. This is not the moment
to decide whether the work you find is fit
for Instagram or not, it is just the time to collect. Here, I have already collected a bunch of artworks
from the past, things that I did ages ago. These colored ones were
one of my first drawings. This is all material
that I already have, that I already drew, that I have as my safety net while I also do some active
posting on the site. This I collect just so that when I feel the need to not work on social media
for a certain day, I can continue to engage
with my audience. I can continue to post
without thinking about it. Just go on your
computer, on your phone, go on your old sketchbooks, and try to collect
as much as you can. I've collected these ones. As you can see, I don't have
30 for the whole month. I don't have more than
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 so about 20. What I suggest is that you take them even if they're really bad, even if they're not great. Just take them. As you can see, I just
put them in a folder. What I'm going to do when
I already have them, is go to my Adobe Express and you're going to go to libraries on the left hand side, and you're going to
create a new library. You're going to go ahead
and create a library, and I'm going to call
it December 2022. I want to create a library and I'm going to put
them there for now. I'm going to go to Assets and I'm going to just
dump that there. I'm going to go here. I'm just going to call it here so I'm going to select all
and I'm going to open them. I'm just going to
add them there. These are going to be the ones that I'm going to be
scheduling later.
5. Repurposing: Now that we have collected all the artwork we could find, the good, the great, the ugly, and unfinished, we will move on to
making as many posts, as much content as
we possibly can from what we have found. This is called
repurposing content. For this, I would
like to share with you the three main ways in which I repurposed my artwork on my social media accounts
and why I do so. Method 1: To show growth. If I find old drawings for when I was not as
good as I am now, I often like to give
it another shot. If I find a drawing
I would like to have done better
or no longer like because I grew artistically, then I like to redraw it
and make it a lesson post. Instead of just showing a
drawing that I no longer like, I turn it into an
opportunity to show just how much I've grown. If I find a drawing
that I do not like now, but I liked in the past, I just like to
reflect a little bit on my growth as an artist and I like to show how I would
go about it differently, looking at it retrospectively. I once found this drawing
and I wanted to reuse it, but I hated it looking
at it from the future, if you can say that. What I did is that I redrew it, the same exact thing, just took my pencil and my iPad and redrew the same
drawing in a way that I would go about
it now, I guess. I just made a carousel, so as you can see down here, there's the two photos
together side-by-side, and I just showed how I
would have improved it. Method 2: Mockup magic. If I find digital drawings, I like to add them to a mockup and show them in a
different setting so that my following
might get an idea of how they look as wall art. In my case, I am an artist
that sells her art, so this type of posts are
great for the followers that are potential buyers. Putting the art in different
settings allows me to share the same piece several times under
different environments that would appeal to
different people. I do believe that whenever
you show a client or whenever you show
you're following how your art would
look like on the wall, it actually puts
it into a setting, it puts it into context, and so I always like to put
my drawings into mockups. One of the things that Adobe Express has is
actually lots of mockups. If you have the paid
version, which is, I don't know, about
$8-$9 a month, you can actually just
go to, let's say, for example, Photos and you
actually just type mockup. See, I just literally just
wrote mockup on the search and there's a bunch of
mockups for you to use. I'm just going to take
one and take that photo, make it nice and big, center it. Let's say that I'm going
to go to my library and I'm going to find one
of my transparent drawings. "View all", it's not
showing them all. Let's say, I think this
one is transparent if I'm not mistaken. Yes, it is. I'm just going to take this one, I'm going to make it smaller, I'm going to put it into
my mockups, and voila. I can actually post
this and give my following an idea of what it
would be like to buy my art. Last but not least, Method 3: Post as is, change something
other than the art. If you really love
the art as it is and you want to
simply re-share it, feel free to do so. We see so much content
in social media that most of the time
people don't remember what they see until they've
seen it at least 2-3 times. When I simply re-post, I like to change something else, like the placement,
or the caption, or the music I put on the post. Sometimes I just like
a piece of work a lot, and I feel like sometimes
it just doesn't get the attention I would
like it to get in a sense that I was actually very
proud of this video, and I shared it as a Reel and it got a lot of plays and a lot of saves
and people liked it, but I found it again
and I was like, "Oh, I'm just going
to post it as it is." I only changed the music. The first time I tried it, it got 10,000 accounts reached, and the second time I posted it, it got 678,000 accounts
reached 2,000 saves; the reaction was much bigger
and I didn't change much, I just did it again to see if it had a
different reaction, I changed the music a bit. I left the art or my video
or my content as is, and then I just
changed something, a caption or music, and gave it a second chance.
6. Crossposting: Now that you have
stretched your art as much as you could in terms
of reusing what you have, I want to tell you
about cross-posting. Cross-posting is when you
use the same content across different social media platforms or even within the same platform but in different placements. Placement is different
places within one platform. So for example, Instagram's
placements are posts, reels, stories or lives. You can put the same
art content as a story and as a post while also putting that same content on
Facebook and Pinterest. So now that I have
collected all these art and I put it already
in a library, another way express, I'm
going to be repurposing it. Meaning every single
drawing I get, I'm going to be using it in different placements in as
many placements as I can. As I explained before, a placement is the
different places where you can post something. On Instagram for example, the placements are a story
or a post or a reel, so I want to go ahead
and use something called multi-pages
on Adobe express. So what I'm going to do is
that I'm just going to go to an Instagram post size. Then I am going to second. Yes. Then I'm going to go
to my design assets. Sorry, to my libraries and I'm going to
choose my library, December Library and I'm
going to have them all here. Let's say this first post, I'm going to put it in here, make it look neat. Let's say this is how I
want it to look right. But what I want to do is stretch the use of this post
as much as I can. What I'm going to do
is that I'm going to go to add a page. I'm going to change the size
within the same document and I'm going to
do the same thing. Go to libraries, go here. I have this. Then I'm going to add
a page, another page. I want to share this
in my Facebook group so I'm going to go to libraries. I'm going to take this. I'm going to share this as a
progress post for example on the group showing one
of my first drawings and how they used to
look and everything. I'm going to be making some forum conversation about how my drawings looked
when I started, and let's say that's it. Now if you go there
where I clicked, you can see that I have the
same drawing turned into a square for a
post on Instagram. I have it turned into Instagram story
and Facebook story and I have a horizontal for
Facebook groups and Facebook. Now, I want to do that
with all of those. I have that one and then
I'm going to proceed into the same process
with all my drawings. That has already made
all these drawings into three times that amount because I have it in three
different placements. I love doing this
using the 3-15 rule which is cross-posting
three types of posts into 15 different
versions of it, both within and across
social media platforms. Here's how to do it. Let's try it together. Okay guys. I saw this 3-15 rule somewhere
online sometime ago. After I learned it and I implemented it
I never looked back. I've always used it. It's great for making a lot
of content out of nothing. Let's say you have a reel, a post, and a carousel. That carousel can be turned
into a reel and a post. You can take a screenshot. You can post a lot of photos
as a reel for example. A lot of people are using
tons of photos really quickly like one second on the
reels so that can be done. Then you can turn a post into
a reel and into a carousel. So the carousel is
like lots of photos. So you can take a post
of a drawing you have and actually take that photo
you have of the drawing and make an example
of how you made this, the materials you used. Turn it into several, break it down into parts. You can actually use just one
photo as a reel with music. A lot of people are
like complaining that the algorithm
just wants videos and so a lot of people
are making trendy using just a photo as a
reel, just one photo. No movement, no nothing, just music and an image
or sound and an image. Then you can turn a reel,
yes, you guessed it, into a post just to steal from your reel into
a separate post, just an image from that
reel and a carousel. The same exact reel just
in different parts. Now, you already have there three, nine different
different posts. Then what you can do is
that you can cross post. You can take that
real that you created and post it to TikTok. I don't know the logo
for TikTok, whatever. You can post it onto TikTok and you can post it
on YouTube shorts. YouTube shorts is
the same exact ratio for reels and TikTok posts. Then you can also do
the same thing here. Sorry, with this reel and
turn it into, you guessed it, TikTok post and YouTube shorts. Then you can also, same thing, this reel
turn into TikTok. It's actually this
way, is that a J. TikTok and a short for you too. So here you have extended the amount of content
that you could use. So here you have 9, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Just three posts turned into 15 because you broke it down, you stitched together, or you simply used
it as a still.
7. Schedule: Scheduling your
posts and stories to post automatically
is really what makes all this work worthwhile. Once a month, I go through
all of this process to ensure that I don't have to stay
on top of social media and most importantly, that I don't have to
think about what to post every single day. Of course, I still have to
go on the platform daily to answer messages and comments and from time-to-time
to upload reals. But I really love
the freedom that scheduling my posts gives me. The platform keeps being tended to while I focus
on doing new work. Already placed all of
your planned posts in different sizes and sizes that are helpful
like I did before. You can schedule that post
to post automatically by clicking on this
little button here. If you have the paid
version of Adobe Express, it's actually one of the few
things you can't do with the free version to
schedule your post. What I like to do is that since these are my safety net content, I like to just simply
select the platforms that I'm going to be working
that I wanted to post to. I put just two hashtags. I don't worry too much
about the caption because I am still going to be doing organic posts
throughout the month whenever I can whenever
I feel like it. These are only here to
make me feel like I can relax and chill and social
media is going to be taken care of by Adobe
expresses poster. I'm going to just select
my published date. This is really important. Don't choose your time randomly. Just go to your Instagram. If you go to your insights, you will see where your
followers are shown. Just go all the
way to the bottom and it shows you your
most active times. I usually go for midday because that's the highest time
overall in my profile. All you have to do
is choose the time. I'm going to go for
midday, not AM but PM. I'm going to hit "Done". I'm just going to publish this. I have it scheduled. Now this is for tomorrow. I have already
scheduled for tomorrow. Now I want to show you
guys why I schedule. Don't get me wrong, I don't put too much
attention to detail on my scheduled posts because I schedule my posts just
as my peace of mind. This is my lazy social
media workflow solution. I would call it. I rely heavily on doing this. I put no effort
into the captions because I overthink a lot. If I put effort into all
the captions all the time, number 1, it doesn't feel honest because these
captions are curated and then created forcibly. Whereas whenever I
create a caption, I usually do it on my
organic day-to-day whenever I have time
posts because it's real something I want to say,
something I want to share. These ones just
have the hashtags and they're there to remind my followers that I'm here. I'm thinking about them. I just can't social
media right now. It seems to work for me. It seems to work so well. This is the month of November. During the month of November, I was traveling and I scheduled all my social media and
it gave me peace of mind. I got over 200, 300
followers because I kept reaching those
people that I had to reach. Here I can actually show
you what that looked like. I was testing this out
first in September. I stopped doing it in October and I took it over
again in November. You can see the
numbers don't lie. In September, I started
scheduling my posts on the 4th. You can see that on the 6th, my audience started picking up. I got new followers
every single day, about 40 something
followers a day. When I stopped posting around the 20 something
of September, again, you can see it on my schedule I
stopped on the 21st. You can see how my
audience diminished. Then the same I did
that on, in October. In the month of October, you can see that I did not post anything as in not I
posted organically, but not on my scheduler. I wanted to show you
how October looks like. October looks like this. Look at my last days of
October, they were sad. You can see how these people were unfollowing me actually, instead of just following me. Then in November,
I did it again. I scheduled posts
from around the 4th, and my audience
started picking up. Again see on the
6th of November, my audience started going
on the plus and the plus. Then I reached about 20, 30 something followers a day. Then higher, then higher
and steadily from there while my posts were scheduled. This is something that I know
works because of the data, because of the analytics. I am able to see the growth, the consistent growth when I schedule my
safety net posts. It gives me peace of mind.
8. Conclusion: Social media is a tool
that in my opinion, we can use to our advantage. As a small business owner that does not have an
advertising budget, social media is my
most powerful tool. I understand how it
can be frustrating, but in the years I
have been working on the entrepreneurial side and
the corporate side of it, I have found that working
consistently on it, is what has given me
the best results. Going viral is nice of course, but growing consistently and slowly has earned me
more loyal followers. These followers
like the art I do and are willing to come to
my classes and buy my art. These workflow helps
me with consistency. It helps me on the days that I just don't
want to deal with it. I would really love to see
your schedules, calendars. Please feel free to
ask me questions. Let me know about your
victories and your failures. I would love to see how
this workflow helped or didn't help you in your
social media growth journey. If you want to know more
about how reels work and how I do them to
grow as an artist, make sure to check
out my course, Instagram reels for artists, making rules that
serve a purpose, by going to my profile. Thanks for taking this course and I hope to see you soon. Bye.
Attabeira German, One-Line Illustrator
