How to Use Social Media to Showcase Your Cosplay
Social media is a powerful tool to build an audience, sell product and generate brand deals and appearance opportunities. You have to know how to use it right though if you want your costumes to generate popularity. This guide will walk you through how to use social media to showcase your cosplay effectively. We'll cover everything from different platforms to how to use them.
Platforms for Cosplay
There is an abundance of social media platforms to choose from. Some are more effective than others and each requires it's own unique strategy.
This platform let's you share images or short form, vertical videos. This can be done via posts, reels, stories and live streams. To help your content get discovered you can write SEO-rich and engaging captions, utilize hashtags and add audio for the video or image. It's a great tool for sharing cosplay WIPS, finished builds and vlogging. They are also very business friendly and make selling and promoting your storefronts and product easy. It's definitely a commonly used platform by cosplayers and can be considered very high value for promoting your personal brand.
Threads
Created by Meta, who also owns Instagram, this is a platform where commonly people share text based posts. It gained popularity being one of many rising platforms designed to compete with Twitter/X. You can still share images within your post as well as text. It also links with your Instagram to make adding all of your followers from one platform to the other a breeze. It can be a good tool for sharing your tips, plans and other updates.
TikTok
Original designed solely for vertical, short form videos, this platform has developed multiple content forms for their app. You can also share stories, live streams and long form, vertical videos. This app is also considered a search engine on it's own and can be used to your favor for evergreen content. This requires strategic on-screen text in videos, captions and subtitles. You can also add hashtags and trending audios similar to Instagram. People often love using this for videos showcasing their cosplays, skits or creating tutorials.
You can create a page for your cosplay brand on Facebook that users can follow. From there you can share things similar to threads with videos, images or just text. For video you have the options to do short or long form and photos you can post singular images or full albums. This form of social media has been around for quite sometime. It also can house most kinds of cosplay content like WIP or finished images and tutorial videos.
Pintrest
Sharing pins advertising your cosplays, blog posts, products and videos is easy on this site. Organize your pins accordingly into boards to help make it easier on followers to find what they're looking for. This is a great platform for sharing photos and promoting your content and products.
YouTube
This platform is mainly for video content. Originally it was for long form videos but has since added everything from short form, live streaming and a community feed for text, image and poll based posts. It's an all in one platform that can also be monetized.
The platform is great for essentially any cosplay content. From sharing photos of finished cosplays, tutorials on how you made a costume or even vlogs from cons. It has the benefits of going viral by using trends in short form content or creating evergreen SEO content that'll build organic traffic for months. Optimize your videos with SEO rich titles, descriptions and tags or aim for blowing up with a trend by using strong hashtags and audios.
You can have both a profile and a subreddit dedicated to your cosplaying. This way you can build followers and a community where members can engage together. You're able to post in all sorts of formats such as text, images and videos. Reddit also functions like a search engine and can help generate organic traffic to your posts depending on what you share.
You don't have to create your own subreddit though. There is countless cosplay focused subreddits out there you can share in to promote yourself and your costumes. You can also share crafting tips and get help as you need.
Tips for Showcasing & Standing Out
There is a few general tips to keep in mind to make yourself stand out online. When trying to understand how to use social media to showcase your cosplay, consider the following on any of your different platforms.
Use trends - From hashtags to audios, there's countless trends that you can create content around. The key is to create something unique from what everyone else is doing and post before the trend comes to an end. Keep in mind things like movie and game releases as well since those will often lead cosplay trends.
Create SEO rich content - If you want content with more longevity than trends, consider creating SEO content. This can be blog posts or long form videos where the topic is focused around something with high search value. From there you optimize the content to get discovered organically through search engines.
Be unique - Doing exactly what everyone else is doing will cause your social media to get lost in the crowd. In order to stand out, you need to find ways to be unique from other cosplayers. Whether that's doing OCs, mashups or genderbends, it's up to you to find your niche that makes you different from every other cosplayer.
Create quality content - Making content just for the sake of making it may leave you with a large quantity of videos and pictures. However, that won't guarantee people enjoy it and want to view your social media. Be sure to put time and thought into what you create so it's quality content that people will want to see.
Conclusion
You have a wide variety of options when it comes to social media platforms to showcase your cosplays on. It's all about finding where your audience is and which you enjoy creating on. From there, think of your strategy and how you're going to set yourself apart from other cosplayers.
Share Your Cosplay Tips and Stories!
Whether you're a seasoned cosplayer or just starting out, experimenting with different social platforms can open up endless possibilities for your cosplays. We'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences with social media, so please leave a comment below sharing your favorite social media and content tips.
Got more tips or advice on using social media to showcase your cosplays?
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Love this. Great work putting it together.