Social Media for Photographers Part 2 – How to Market your Photography Business
Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Snapchat Tumblr Google+ 500 pixels flicker so many choices so little time where should you post your photos do you need to be on all of those websites which ones will help you to find new customers how often do you need to post what days and what times are the best times how are you going to find an extra eight hours a week to get all of this done it's not as tough as you think but you may want to pour yourself a stiff one before we start stay tuned until the end and I'll give you my formula for preparing images so they look their best on all of the different social media websites hey gang if you haven't already watched this video part one of my social media for photographer set I would encourage you to start there if you survive that first video and you're ready to get started on the real work let's start with the breakdown of the different social media platforms and why you may or may not want to use them now please understand understand that there is no one-size fits-all answer when it comes to marketing and hopefully you are working to set yourself and your photography apart so I'm going to give you the overview and the information to help you decide where to invest your time and efforts but it wouldn't be right for me to tell you in a video exactly how you should do your social media since I don't know the intimate details of your business with over 1.6 billion monthly users users Facebook is the king of them all so at a minimum you need to be on Facebook if you want to be found for portrait wedding and model photographers Facebook is outstanding for helping you to build brand awareness by allowing you to post photos and videos as well as communicate directly with your customers and potential customers in other words if you're not on Facebook you don't exist to your customers even if they find you elsewhere they will want to look you up on Facebook because it provides more opportunities for them to investigate you and your work Facebook has become the primary communication tool for many people and businesses Facebook also gives you several ways to make connections and meet new people and advertise your services it allows you to have a personal page a business page and gives you the ability to start participating in specialized groups like my ioot people photographers group Facebook also allows you to do paid advertising if your budget permits that's not something that I would recommend that you do right away but I'll discuss paid advertising in a separate video you should also be aware that the largest growth sector for Facebook in recent years has been with adults over the age of 25 not teenagers in other words the people with the money they're on Facebook Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform that is designed to be used as a mobile app in other words you can view it on a computer but you can only upload photos from your phone unless you use one of the automation tools that I'll talk about later Instagram is very popular among the 18 to 29y old age bracket which makes it a great marketing platform for high school senior portrait photographers and wedding photographers as well as Shooters who work with models while the platform does allow for text along with your posts it is a visual platform so the expectation is that your photos and videos will speak for themselves Instagram supports videos up to 60 seconds in length and you do have the option to purchase paid advertising on Instagram Instagram also allows you to cross poost to Facebook and Tumblr directly from the Instagram app Instagram has recently launched Instagram stories which allow you to share a thread of photos and videos that will appear at the top of your followers feeds which in this day of competing for screen time is a very valuable place to be but a warning don't make the mistake of creating stories just to be at the top of the page if there is no value in your stories people will quickly learn to ignore all of your post Instagram stories disappear 24 hours after you post them a cool little feature that comes with Instagram stories you are able to tell the username of every person that views your story this has great potential for followup and of course if you're in the habit of social stalking people remember that they will know when you have checked out their story at 140 characters per post Twitter is fast-paced and concise and can be an easy way to connect with your followers but it is not the most effective platform for finding new customers originally designed to be a Texton platform Twitter does support photo posts and short videos up to you guessed it 140 seconds long Twitter strength lies in its ability to distribute news quickly more so than Facebook Twitter users do tend to follow companies Brands and will use the platform to communicate directly with them Twitter users tend to check their feed more than any other social media platform and like Facebook and Instagram Twitter does allow you to do paid advertising Pinterest is a content sharing website that allows you to share or post photos and videos to pin boards Pinterest likes to describe itself as a catalog of ideas that inspires people to go out and do it is essentially a form of visual book marking the Pinterest user base is more than 80% female wedding photographers if you're not on Pinterest and using it actively you're missing out as social media and the internet grow up Brides to be are using Pinterest to shop for and plan for every detail of their wedding including their photographers Pinterest is also heavily used by people looking for interesting portrait ideas and family portraits and baby photos and it also serves as a great way to share and discuss potential ideas with models as you plan a photo shoot Pinterest is also a great way for Real Estate photographers to show off their ability because many people will plan their new home designs by using Pinterest LinkedIn is different from the other social media platforms because it is designed for businesses and professionals to communicate LinkedIn is definitely not a place to post your photos and brag about how great your work is this is a platform that you use to make connections for those of you who offer headshot services to business professionals or who are looking to connect with marketing contacts at larger companies Linkin is a valuable resource now before I discuss the rest let me explain that for the purpose of marketing your photography Services those five Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest and Linkedin they are the five that you're going to look at and determine what and how much you should be doing I'll talk a bit more in a minute about how you make that choice but the remaining platforms in the list are much more specialized and will only be helpful to some people Tumblr is a micro blogging website what does Micro blogging mean it is a post that can contain a photo or a video but usually contains a short story somewhere between the 140 characters of Twitter and usually less than a thousand-word essay honestly for most photographers tumbler doesn't hold a lot of marketing opportunities and I wouldn't use it in place of a real blog on your website I'll just discuss blogging in an upcoming marketing video now if you're a photographer that shoots Fine Art nudes and has a following of people who appreciate your work Tumblr can be a great way to share your images since they don't prohibit nudity Tumblr does also have themes which allow you to customize your profile similar to the way you would customize a WordPress blog Google+ was originally developed to be Google's Facebook killer but it didn't quite work out that way Google has since disabled much of the platform and as Google of does they reuse parts of it in other ways an example of that is the commenting system for YouTube which was originally developed as part of Google+ you won't pick up customers on Google+ but I would encourage you to set up both a personal and business page and at least update them occasionally the Google search engine does show Google+ pages in search results so you should maintain a simple Google Plus page for yourself and your business my working philosophy is that if Google does it I'll participate Google is The Keeper of the data and the main gateway to All Things internet so I want to be on their good side at all times if you have a Gmail address or a YouTube channel you already have a Google+ Page so if you haven't at least set it up you're looking in complete to the few people that do find you there Snapchat is the last of the mainstream social networks that I'll mention in this video originally conceived as a class project by three students at Stanford University University Snapchat is an image messaging app that for many younger internet users is the primary messaging and image sharing service a large part of its attraction is that the messages can be set to self-d delete after being viewed Snapchat supports photos and short videos and like Instagram it allows you to share stories due to the onetoone messaging system at the core of Snapchat's design it is much more difficult to develop a strong following on this platform brands that are heavily committed to social media often use other platforms to direct users to their Snapchat efforts but it is not a platform that is conducive to helping you find new clients so there you have it the top eight social media platforms as of this video now I know some of you are thinking I forgot sites like 500 pixels or Flickr or Model Mayhem those are very specialized sites that are great for sharing your work and finding like-minded people but they aren't going to help you get a lot of new customers so I'll discuss them in a later video in a perfect world all of them but remember when it comes to business and marketing Roi return on investment must be continually evaluated to be sure that the way you spend your time and money is paying off otherwise it's not business it's simply foolish fun don't make the mistake of thinking that your time doesn't cost you anything just because you're not actively spending money your time is your most valuable resource so if you're using social media for fun and to connect with like-minded people I would encourage you to use Facebook and then whichever sites you find people with similar interests on in other words in this case there are no rules other than to use proper social media etiquette well if you're using social media to build a business you need to be where your customers are I would recommend the following to start Facebook is the must have for all photographers but wedding photographers will put extra emphasis on Pinterest baby and family portrait photographers also need to focus on Pinter interest in addition to Facebook and Instagram if you're a high school senior portrait photographer Facebook and Instagram are your primary platforms but I would encourage you to stay active on Twitter because your high school juniors and seniors will want to share your work with all their friends portrait product real estate and Architectural photographers should also maintain a LinkedIn presence in order to build your corporate and business headshot clientele remember these are my recommendations to get you started don't follow them blindly use them as a guide and as your following grows and as you build your business it's important to routinely re-evaluate your social media efforts okay enough about social media Philosophy for now I would encourage you to tune into my Thursday tog chats live here on YouTube the Thursday tog chats are all about marketing for photographers and I'll be discussing websites and social media as it relates directly to a different photographer's website each week now I promise to tell you about some automation tools that that would save you time and help you simplify your social media efforts before I give you the list let me explain that the idea with creating content is to use and reuse it whenever and wherever possible creating content for one social media platform is costly as an example when I make a video for you on YouTube that video then gets turned into a Blog article several quotes from the video become tweets on Twitter the video is shared on all of my social media platforms and then the blog article is also shared on all of my social media platforms some of the articles are then Rewritten or combined to become submissions for magazines now you may not be producing videos and writing articles but a simple blog post for your website can be shared on all of your social media Outlets from that blog post you may be able to create several photo posts just because you have 10 great shots from a wedding that doesn't mean you need to share them all in the same social media post spread it out over multiple posts and in each post tell a little story about the wedding and you're experience with the couple see if you can get the couple to write you a short testimonial that you can include in one of the posts remember it's the stuff that goes with your photos that people actually care about they don't really care about your photos tune in to the weekly talk Chats on Thursdays and you'll hear me talk a lot more about this now I know that some of you are asking what exactly an automation tool is a social media automation tool allows you to create posts for multiple social media accounts in advance and and schedule a time for them to be automatically posted in other words you could spend an hour or two on a Monday and create all of your social media posts for the week upload them and then they'll automatically post on the days and times that you requested the options that I'm going to discuss all have a free plan that will allow you to connect a few accounts and provide you with all the basic features and of course they all have paid options that allow you to connect all of your accounts and these paid plans also come with additional features like analytics so that you can track the effectiveness of your post my favorite automation tool is called hoot Suite other popular ones are buffer social oomph and Sprout social I've placed a link for all of these in the description section below there are many others however you'll find that the other options tend to be platform specific the ones that I've mentioned handle multiple platforms now I know that a lot of you would like me to walk you through these platforms so that you can see how they work that would make this a 2-hour video be sure to check out my Thursday talk chats for more on the automation tools okay let's talk about the media part of social media I promise to give you my formula for preparing images so that they look their best on all the different social media websites the two most important things to understand about the media are image size and image size in other words pixel dimensions the height and the width and the total file size especially if you're posting a Facebook most of the social media platforms accept files of sever several megabytes or even larger however Facebook does have a cap of 100K on the photos that you upload for timeline covers so it's important to be stingy with your file size and even for your own website Google wants pages to load very fast so smaller file sizes help your page speed rankings with Google I work primarily in Photoshop so when I'm prepping an image to go online that's where I'll be here are the steps that I have used for years to save my photos for web use now I will tell you I've recently started using a piece of software that automates all of this so I'm going to give you both versions in Photoshop make sure your images are set to srgb color space all web browsers render images best in srgb colorspace and the overwhelming majority of monitors and devices that surf the Internet are set to srgb so if you want to be sure your color looks good on as many devices as possible srgb it is resize your images to the appropriate size for the website and type of post you are making this will take a little extra work but it will make a huge difference in how your images appear as a photographer you don't want to give up control and allow a website to manipulate your images any more than necessary so if you make your images conform to their size guidelines that means they'll be doing less to your photos in other words never upload full resolution images when you resize the images set your resolution to 7 72 pixels per inch and use by cubic resampling set the pixel dimensions that you want the file saved at based on the social media website that you intend to post it on after you've resized your images for the web in Photoshop you may want to add just a little bit of sharpening for my taste I will duplicate the Finish layer choose filter then sharpen and then Edge sharpen and then I'll reduce that layer opacity to 50% before I save the file many people simply use the unsharpen mask at its default settings and that's fine for most images others have very detailed formulas that they prefer I won't debate the merits of any of these this step is what I like to call flavor to taste just don't oversharpened the file save for web feature or if you're in Photoshop CC use file export save for web Legacy save the file as a a progressive jpeg with a quality of at least 60 mine is usually set between 80 and 100 be sure to select Progressive as the jpeg type this is important because of compression now for you Lightroom users don't fret I didn't forget you follow the link in the description below to an article on my blog that contains all the settings that I recommend for Lightroom now I mentioned a piece of software that I now use to automate the file save for web process it's called jpeg mini you can use this as a standalone program program on Windows or Mac or you can use it as a plugin directly inside of Photoshop or Lightroom I use the plugin version in Photoshop jpeg mini is capable of reducing the file size of your images by up to 80% without compromising image quality now full disclosure jpeg mini is not sponsoring this video and I did pay for my version of the software this is a program that I really love and now I use it religiously I've included a link to their website in the description below they do have a free trial version that will allow you to compress 200 images before purchase in addition to doing a great job of compressing images regardless of whether you use it in Photoshop or Lightroom it's pretty much a oneclick process fast and easy and the results are incredible okay gang now do you understand why I suggested the stiff drink I can go on for another few hours and still barely scratch the surface please make it a point to check out my weekly Thursday tog chats that focus on marketing for photographers and that way we can keep the marketing discussion going as you dig in and work to improve your social media game next up in the marketing for photographer series we're going to talk about domain names and websites so until next time gang remember we're going to do a little different today remember your best post it's your next post so please guys keep learning keep thinking and keep posting adios
