Part of making this website involved creating social media pages for each of what I thought to be the major art related social media platforms based on my research. One for videos (youtube) and then six more for images. I then included the webpages I made on each social media platform as links through the social media buttons (you can see my social medial buttons in the footer). During this process I became familiar with each of the following platforms and their apps.

Facebook

I am not a big facebook fan on a number of different levels. I think it may be unhealthy in some cases and overall I was really amazed at how difficult they were to work with. They seem kind of big, insensitive and inflexible. I had some trouble getting the page set up the way I wanted it. All the other social media platforms were much more flexible with the username and url and were generally simpler to use. I had to appeal with facebook to have my username changed, to something that fit with my branding, over and over again prior to getting it approved. This seemed really ridiculous given that every other social media provider was happy to let me customize my landing page, user name and url address however I wanted to fit with my branding. On the upside their app interface is easy to use and very similar to the full desktop version in functionality. They also have it set up so you can easily add content and display text, images and video in an attractive way.

Pintrest

Their app leaves something to be desired but it is functional. Could be easier to set up a web page and account. Once you have set up a board it is fairly easy to add pins to the board but it could be more intuitive. Some times their emails with posts that I might be interested in seemed pretty good and they might get better if I had more content on their site. I don’t have a lot up on their site except for my link so people can follow or tag me. They are clearly oriented towards fine art to some degree so that is a big plus in terms of the content and user base. They also have the images well categorized so it is easy to search their site for the types of art you like, I think this might be hand curated or their image recognition algorithms are really good. On the downside it is clear that their visual similarity algorithm is mostly based on color and little else which is not good at all for finding content related to your posts.

Instagram

Their app leaves a lot to be desired, in fact it looks like a cell phone app. There is not much more to say on that topic, they need a new app. Hopefully they will add a more professional app soon and I can revise this review. In terms of linkage with other platforms, this platform does have a good feature, which you can enable, that adds the posts you put up on their platform to facebook and tumbler. This is nice if you want to use their platform to post on multiple social medial platforms at once. So I have started to use them to post on three of six social media platforms. Also it is easy to post content to their platform as well except for the fact you can’t pull files from the cloud. Instead you have to move your art to photos and then upload from photos to instagram.

Tumbler

Their app is pretty basic but better than instagram and similar to pintrest in terms of ease of use. I did not see a way to sort content by category with the app so this is a weakness but tumbler is clearly for art and so has a good user and content base. Easy to set up and customize account.

Flickr

Professional app with good layout and functionality. Easy to set up and customize account. Images are not very well categorized in the app and while visually appealing still very photography oriented as opposed to fine arts but there is a lot of good content. I am not sure how this one will work out in terms of getting people to my site and will have to watch my google analytics reports to see if I appeal to any of their user base. Since this is not linked into instagram and not fine arts oriented I was not posting to it as much until recently. I have started to use Flickr recently as you can embed slideshows from Flickr into your website. It is pretty simple, basically make the slideshow in Flickr and then put the Flickr slideshow ID into a wordpress plugin and then the plugin gives you some short code to put in the post or on the page. Another good thing about Flickr is that they let you keep your copyright but you can both use their site to store files and publicize your work. This is a sharp contrast from sites like youtube and facebook/instagram/tumbler for instance where they make you surrender your copyright to post on their site.

Deviant Art

Professional looking app with good functionality that nearly matches desktop site. Well categorized content with a clear fine arts orientation. I think that this was the best of the art social media apps I looked at from the point of view of fine art content and users. There is also a lot of fine art activity and posts. Highly recommended for both the community base and content already present. Taking the time to post to it even if they do not link posts on their platform to other social media platforms.

Youtube

While you might not think of this as a digital painting artist social media app, there are some possibilities. I use it to post my drawing and painting videos which I then use in my website as the demos in the video widgets. I have a channel with digital painting video demos and a profile. This also means the digital painting video demos are searchable in google. The app is really pretty good and they recently updated it to be even better. The youtube video editor was great until google recently took it away. So now if you want to edit videos you have to do it on another editor. This can be a problem as these files can be large and the free online video editors I have looked at limit your file size. Also is it hard to upload videos from the cloud and you have to save them on a desktop and then upload them to youtube. I wish they would fix this and let us import from a cloud storage provider. This social media platform is working to bring people into my website so I do recommend this if you can make some video content of you art.