Networking

Heyo fellas! Been a little while since I've written a journal entry here, partially due to the topic I'm about to delve into.
You don't need to read the whole thing. But I'd appreciate it if you weigh in on the questions!



So, networking! Also known as self-promotion, getting yourself known, or "pimping yourself". It takes many forms, online especially; just about everybody does it, some more consciously then others. Sometimes it's as simple as saying hi to a few people, and earning a new friend. Farther up the ladder, you might find yourself traveling across states or even countries to attend shows and conventions with the hopes of widening your audience. It doesn't necessarily have to be your art that you're trying to promote, but for the purposes of this little entry, I'll mostly be sticking to the art topic.

Now, before you get your hopes up, this isn't going to be the part where I start explaining how to become well-known. I haven't figured that part out yet, myself.
Rather, I'd like to spark a bit of discussion on the topic, and maybe glean a few thoughts and opinions from all of you out there.

Let me simply lay out a by no means exhaustive list of some of the methods I've seen, though maybe not tried.
Online gallery/portfolio. This one's easy; you're on it! deviantART and ConceptArt.org are the two major ones that I'm aware of; creating your own website is less social, but does a much better job of showing you off. (On deviantART for an easy example, everybody tends to look alike at a glance; your gallery is the biggest thing setting you apart from everyone else, and even then it can be all to easy for your work to disappear beneath the mountains of fellow artists' works.)
Social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are three major ones, but there's plenty of others out there. Myself, I use all three, though Facebook tends to be less interesting, Twitter takes a fair bit of work to stay active, and Tumblr isn't well suited to showcasing a single artist's work.
Live streaming. Livestream is (unsurprisingly) the most popular one here. From my limited experience, livestreaming your artwork or some other art-related subject is a great way to reach out and involve your audience, though it's also not necessarily the best for gaining an audience if you don't already have one.
Communities. This also includes deviantART and ConceptArt.org, but primarily, when I say communities I mean forums, chatrooms, and other such social tools. There's no one example here; the communities that work for you will tend to be more specific ones, geared towards your art style or interests or related subjects. It's a great way to make new connections however, especially if you think outside the box. (An artist who primarily paints images of cars might find a lot of interested folks on a car-themed forum, for example.)
Conventions and shows. Yes, there is such a thing as meeting people off the internet! Conventions and shows are a great way to do so; anime conventions for example will almost always have an "artist's alley", where artists can get themselves a booth and sell some of their art. Other conventions and shows might not have a setup for artists - or even have anything to do with art - but they might have something to do with your art, like that previous example of a car artist finding an audience in a bunch of car folks. Tough to show off your work, but a great way to meet people interested in some of the same subjects you're interested in.

I'm sure there's plenty more to add to this list that I'm not aware of, or even some items I've simply forgotten about. But I need to cut myself short here before I get too far! My goal here is to spark discussion.
So, here's some questions for all of you (that's right, ALL of you, including you, bored passer-by who got distracted by my journal):

What (if any) networking tools do you yourself use? (well, obviously deviantART, but feel free to mention if you don't use it much, or use it all the time)
Do you try to network a lot, or not at all? What's your goal? (i.e., doing artwork as a profession, or just meeting lots of people)
Do you have any tips, opinions, or experiences with networking you'd like to share?

Answer as many or as few of the above as you'd like, or simply chime in with whatever comes to mind. I'm all ears! (well, technically, all eyes, in this instance.)