Good afternoon, friends!
I’ve been in the NFT game for quite some time now. I’ve minted them and played with them on both sides of the equation. A large part of the experience for smaller collections is about building an audience and getting a trading scene and part of that is notoriety. And how do people generally make their notoriety? It’s social media.
Recently we’ve seen what big, centralized social media has been trying to get into the NFT game little by little. It’s all very Web2, but that’s to be expected, the industry’s not going to give up its darlings but we can still benefit from it.
Twitter recently announced the ability to display market listings for NFTs directly in tweets, which makes it easier to buy and sell art directly through tweets. This isn’t that big of a game changer, but it may open up other opportunities such as galleries where listings can be easily accessed, or other social media platforms doing something similar.
The benefit of these listings is that it pulls data directly from the partnered marketplace along with the NFT artwork while providing a direct link. This takes some of the guesswork out of posting a listing into a tweet, which could make it even easier for smaller NFT artists trying to spread the news about their art to their communities.
Right now, Twitter is only partnered with four different marketplaces: Magic Eden, Rarible, Dapper Labs, and Jump.trade.
This feature follows Twitter adding NFT profile pictures, which allowed users to use their NFT artwork as their profiles in “soft hexagon” images, but they couldn’t sell them on markets. Recently, Instagram also began offering NFT galleries to users to show off their NFTs as well, automatically attributing the creators and collectors of the NFTs.
This slow integration of NFTs into social networks may help popularize them, even though it’s a mixture of Web2 and Web3 technologies. NFT artists are just like every other creator, they need to get the word out, and communicating with the people who collect and buy their artwork is paramount to keeping their projects alive – and in some cases their livelihoods.
Attribution of artwork, especially NFT collections, is particularly important because it routes potential audiences back to creators. One thing that happens consistently on social media is that artwork is constantly copied and sometimes attribution is lost. Having the chance for NFT collections to maintain that signature and loop back to the original artist or collection and for the owner of the NFT to be able to show off their connection is just another “hey look at me!” adds just another point to the art economy.
Many NFT creators already use social media to get the word out, as it were, and have established communities on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. These different platforms beginning to embrace NFTs shows that there’s an increasing adoption in the mainstream for them paving the way for their future.
This means that now is a great time to get in. If you haven’t bought an NFT yet, you could check out FreeRossDAO’s current Grow In the Dark Genesis Mintpass NFT, which features an original 1/1 black and white still from Ross Ulbricht’s animation that was purchased by the DAO during the Bitcoin22 auction.
