Making Sales By "Shaking Hands" Virtually?

I've seen the potential in social media marketing for a long time, and I know it can be good for sales if you have a following. But it's a long uphill climb to get a meaningful following, and some platforms such as Twitter, are much better for finding people and talking to them one on one, rather than broadcasting.

So, I've been wondering about just going around and socializing with people on Twitter and Instagram and if that might be effective for making sales if I target my audience well enough. Does anyone do that? Surely some people do, I would think.

I've tried doing this somewhat, but my niche choices were not good ones. I do want to try it now that I'm in the graphic design niche, because that fills an actual need. However, before I spend a really long time pursuing this, I'd like to know if it really can be effective so I don't waste a whole bunch of time.

See, the way I see it is that it's kind of like being able to meet people at a convention or some place like that and shake their hand and introduce yourself, except that you're shaking hands virtually. Even though you're not necessarily telling them what you do in your comment on their post, they can clearly see that from your profile name. I believe that one on one interaction can be so much more effective that broadcasting posts.

Another question I have is this: As a graphic design artist I create backgrounds for people to use for site headers, various background graphics, and more. I'm just getting into this, because I was dabbling as an artist before, and obviously that's not a good way to make money, so I switched in order to fill a need. So, for one thing I'm wanting to set myself apart from other people by making mine more complex and artistic that most other backgrounds you would see. But at the same time, I don't know if that would sell.

Do you think that if I tried to be middle of the road and create stuff that's in between fine art (abstract) and a simple background, that it would be an appealing product that people would want to purchase a license for, or would I be forcing myself into obscurity by doing that? It seems that there must be demand out there for stuff that looks less "cheap" or redundant than most of what you would normally see.