Read on Twitter
Some of you may remember when I took a survey of Twitter artists for a class project. The second part of that project was to use the research on our subject in a way that would help people affected by it! So here& #39;s a thread about the limits of posting art to Twitter: (1/17)
Of course, the research I& #39;ve done is limited to what I, a college student trying to complete a project in time, is able to do, but hopefully this can still help if you plan to post art here in the future! It can be a great platform for it, but every site has its issues! (2/17)
First I& #39;ll talk about the survey! I got a lot of info from it, but I& #39;m gonna focus on what artists had to say about Twitter, both positive and negative! Some of the positive points were that Twitter felt more community based and interactive! (3/17)
Another was that there were a lot of fun trends that can encourage people& #39;s art, and sometimes help get you seen! A perfect example would be the K.K. Slider album cover trend going on right now! This Polygon article has a few examples of it! (4/17) http://tiny.cc/becnnz ">https://tiny.cc/becnnz&qu...
But there are just as many flaws of the site, and I focused on those for my research. One thing commonly complained about on Twitter and in the results of my survey was how Twitter handles images in general. Specifically, my concern is with preview cropping. (5/17)
Linked is an article that explains Twitter& #39;s system for creating image previews. Basically, Twitter shows a rectangle-shaped section of the photo, and the viewer clicks to see the rest. Preview sections are chosen by an algorithm, not the poster. (6/17) http://tiny.cc/l3bnnz ">https://tiny.cc/l3bnnz&qu...
"[The algorithm] uses the concept of âsaliencyâ to identify these most interesting regions of an image. Those most likely to be looked at...are usually those featuring faces, text, animals and other more abstract concepts such as areas of high contrast." (7/17)
For photographs, this may work well, choosing the best part of the picture to preview. For drawn art, however, it& #39;s a bit trickier. Faces and figures in a non-realistic style may be hard for the algorithm to detect. Art with lots of contrasting colors may confuse it. (8/17)
If a drawing is going to be liked and shared, it needs to look as appealing as possible. But artists on the site often feel as if this algorithm just doesn& #39;t crop art correctly, and wish they could better choose how it shows up without needing to change the piece itself. (9/17)
Another problem a survey taker brought up was with hashtags. Twitter& #39;s character limits mean you can& #39;t have too many hashtags or you& #39;ll have no space for any sort of caption. They also brought up another site, Tumblr, and how that site has a much cleaner tagging system. (10/17)
Tumblr has a separate section on posts altogether for tags, and they& #39;re in a non-intrusive color. They really are there just so people looking up the tag can find related posts. On Twitter, the blue highlight is glaring, and having them in the caption can look cluttered. (11/17)
Not only are they cluttered and hard to fit in a post, but statistically, posts with one hashtag are 69% more likely to be retweeted. How do you get more people to find your post if your best bet for getting the post shared is to only use one tag? (12/17)
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The final aspects I wanted to look at were the picture limit and the lack of a proper gallery. It& #39;s another point often talked about among the site& #39;s users, and I thought about it in terms of this video on how to get your art noticed by users. (13/17) http://tiny.cc/shfnnz ">https://tiny.cc/shfnnz&qu...
Since I& #39;ve followed some tips the creator made and have had more Instagram success as a result, I thought it would be good to see how those tips translate to Twitter. One she mentions is that a gallery with more art and less personal pictures gets better attention. (14/17)
Twitter& #39;s one gallery making method is the media tab. Unfortunately, ANY media you post goes there: image replies, gifs, and other things that would break up the art you want to show. It leads to creating whole new accounts for art, which can be hard to maintain at times. (15/17)
It& #39;s worth mentioning that I and a lot of other users were once able to use the Moments feature as an alternative. It let you collect tweets in one post that you could scroll through. Unfortunately, this feature was phased out by Twitter and is no longer available. (16/17)
