Thread by @JimZub

Artists: Social media presence is great, but make sure you have a curated portfolio site for potential employers to see what you're capable of.

Sketches and progress stuff is fun and worth showing off to fans, but art directors/editors need to see finished work.

It doesn't have to be fancy. Keep it simple:
Organized sections with your latest/best finished work.
Quality over quantity.
Credits for any collaborators where appropriate.
A simple short bio.
An email to contact.

I keep stumbling across artists on social media with vibrant sketches and lots of potential but they don't seem to have finished work or a landing page for their portfolio/contact info.

Here's the ideal: Art you've posted goes a bit viral. Someone at a company you want to work at finds it and clicks through to your profile. Your header is a sweet piece of finished art. Now they're intrigued. Your portfolio link is easy to find and BAM - you're on their radar.

That's how I found:
@bbbreakfasttt @Kuvshinov_Ilya @subversivegirl @VViiNNG (and others) and offered them an alt cover illo for Wayward or Glitterbomb.

I know it seems obvious, but: The work you show is what employers will expect from you.

If you have no finished work to show on your site, they'll assume you can't do finished work for them.

If you don't have sequential pages, they won't consider you for comics.

The bigger the leap an employer has to make in seeing you working for them, the less likely they'll make the effort to fill in that gap to make it happen.

That's not a laziness thing, it's a time management thing.
Managing projects is a huge headache.
Editors/Art Directors prioritize current work getting done over expanding their contact pool because getting new artists up to speed is time consuming.

You have to show pro quality work that's worth paying for before someone will pay you to do it for them. That's the baseline.

Then, if the opportunities come up, you have to show that you're the kind of person they want to keep working with:
On time. On spec. Good communication

Social media is not a portfolio.
A Tumblr feed with a mess of other people's stuff.
Tweets threading reaction GIFs and in-jokes.
Instagram jam-packed with food and pets.

All that's fine and I know your art is in there too, but make a separate portfolio to stick the landing.