Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook, Maybe You'll Get to See Some Art

I just added a gadget to the blog so that people can click a button and easily Like my Facebook page for Renee Dillon Art. Though, after reading a few articles about how fan pages on Facebook work, I don't know why I bothered. Facebook makes so much sense as a resource. It's a place a lot of people go every day to see things that entertain them. They can customize the things that come up to be of most interest to them. Or at least they should be. These days, it seems, a vast majority of items on the news feed are ads. And they're not even well targeted ads. They're not even ads that interest me. Isn't that the whole point?

Apparently many of the people who Like your page (with the intention of receiving updates from you) don't see your posts at all, unless you pay Facebook to reach a larger portion of your audience. I could understand advertising to reach new fans, but paying to reach current ones? That's absurd. So now I'm not even sure if I should put that much effort into my Facebook profile. 

Everyone who talks about online marketing stresses the importance of creating an email mailing list - that getting a person's email is the only real true way of capturing them in such a way that you don't lose them when a social network goes under. But that's not the way I engage with the people I want to interact with. I follow people on Youtube, I Like artists on Facebook, I pop in and out of blogs that I've bookmarked. It never occurs to me that I want updates emailed to me about the things I'm interested in or want to see. Because email is full of spam, and I believe that a large proportion of people only have emails these days because you need them to sign up for other websites.

My email inbox contains over 900 unread emails. Most of them are things that I might have genuinely interested in at one point. But the companies trying to sell me something all blend together, the clickbait titles lose their appeal and suddenly it's all just a shade of uninteresting beige advertising that I'm not bothered to even open.

So how are we supposed to find our fans, and retain them? How do we make sure the people that we want to entertain, teach, enlighten and inspire can actually hear us, now and in the future? To be honest, I don't really have a good answer to that. All I can suggest is to grab as many people as you can now, in as many places as possible, and hope that they have enough passion for what you do to try and find you if your method of communication falls apart. It's not ideal, but it's all we have. And even if they don't find you again, just hope that what short period of time you could reach them left some kind of positive impact on their life.

"Turbulence", Acrylic Paint on Paper

Well, now that rant is out of the way, here's another of my new abstracts. This one is called "Turbulence". I'm still not really figuring out this whole abstract art thing, but I have decided to start trying to make my painterly abstracts into mirrored, symmetrical designs like my previous geometric abstracts. I'll see how I like that after I've tried a few. There should be a post about it soon.

Also, despite my earlier rant, if you want to Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook I really would appreciate it. For all I know, you will get updates. Maybe they'll change the way you can interact with your fans, maybe they already have, I don't know. Either way, click the Like button in the Facebook widget at the side if you're interested. Thanks for looking. :)