12 Mar March 2019
Welcome to “March Madness” the theme of our new show, starting 16th March. You will see many images from our show in our social media accounts – Instagram and Facebook over the course of the show.
At RAA we use social media to tell the world about our current exhibit in the gallery, give out information of events and classes and share interests to the best of our ability, despite it negative image in main stream media.
“The more RAA has to offer, the more we have to share what we’re doing”, says Linda Willason, one of RAA’s Gallery Coordinators. Linda is responsible for RAA’s Instagram account. She continues, “I’m getting an average of 57 visits a week to RAA’s Instagram bio page by using photos and hashtags (captions) to attract other people interested in art. The hashtag links the post to RAA. For example: #redlandsartists, #arteducation, #redlandsartassociation, will attract anyone on Instagram who is searching for art or art education. They’ll see my posts and click on the hashtag, which takes them to all the photos with that hashtag. If they “like” my photo they can go to the RAA bio page to get the Gallery address & phone number. A huge part of Instagram is “liking” photos. Some of our art posts get a lot of “likes”! I have 24 hours to reply to anyone who comments on the posts or has questions. I had a lady who loved our posts so much, she came into the gallery with a friend to check us out!
If we have special events in the gallery such as the Multi Media Mini Show, I’ll post photos with hashtags like, #minishow, #juriedshow and #artforsalefromgallery. I once took a picture of a horse painting and posted it with #horsepainting, to attract people searching for horse art. You never know who’s searching.”
We use Facebook (FB) in the same way. Our FB page has over 1300 followers now. Occasionally, something exciting happens, which justifies the effort put into social media. For example, a man in Florida bought an artist’s collage of Redlands after seeing the image posted on our FB page and we made arrangements to ship it to him.
Social media is great for keeping people up to date. I routinely take photos of the art class flyers to broadcast them to RAA’s followers. We have almost Instagram 1100 followers who get my posts automatically, in addition to the people who search my hashtags. I’m still learning but I’m seeing results.”
Linda Willason, RAA Gallery Coordinator