Marketing your photography is the key to running a successful business. Good marketing, as we know, is central to generating leads, which in turn become clients, and then go on to become raving fans for your business.
In this Web 2.0 world in which we live, social media has quickly become the de facto requirement for a successful marketing plan, and Facebook plays a major role in that strategy.
How much of a role does Facebook figure in the marketing strategy for your own photography business? Are you wondering how to get more fans, and better engagement from your friends and those who like your business page?
Interview With Photographer Jennifer Vare
If you’d like to learn more about how to develop a healthy Facebook following, stay tuned, because this interview with Jennifer Vare of Jennifer Ellen Photography can help you do just that!
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facebook, Jennifer Vare, photography business, photography marketing
The opinion of the majority is not something one can usually ignore, so 700 million people surely can’t be wrong, can they? So far, I’ve had a mostly great experience with Facebook, finding it to be an indispensable weapon in my marketing arsenal.
However, I’ve noticed a few troubling “features” lately that I find increasingly difficult to ignore.
This is an intentionally short post today, but I wonder if the points contained herein are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to “hidden” Facebook features that people would wish just went away.
Here are three things that have actually bugged me personally over the last week…
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General
facebook, facebook annoyances, social media marketing
Facebook appears to be a marketing dream machine for the professional photographer, as long as we use it correctly, of course. There is no other platform on Earth that allows us to freely share the product of our work with so many people. And the great news is that it recently got a whole lot better!
New Facebook Photo Viewer
Okay, the “new” photo viewer isn’t exactly “new”, since it has been around for some time now, but I thought it might be worth noting in case some photographers haven’t yet caught up, and have missed out on capitalizing on the new features.
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Photography Website SEO
facebook, Facebook marketing, Facebook photos
Facebook, in just a few short years, has literally transformed the way humans communicate on a massive scale. The power of social media to effect revolutionary change in the real world has been repeatedly demonstrated, perhaps most notably by the recent and ongoing unrest in the Middle East.
No doubt remains that Facebook and social media are here to stay, and they will continue to make fundamental changes to the way we interact on many levels.
Facebook Marketing Is Essential
It seems almost inconceivable that anyone can be in business these days, and not have a Facebook presence of some kind. To be on Facebook is as essential as having a website, email address or telephone number. However, the manner in which we manifest our presence on Facebook should be a major concern if we wish to market our business and services effectively.
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Photography Website SEO
facebook, facebook pages, photography marketing
I can see it going through your mind right now… What in the world does popcorn have to do with the photography business? Well, it’s difficult to stretch the analogy too far, but it does present an interesting way to consider how we think about the people we serve – our clients.
Popped Corn Is Unique
The next time you go to the movie theatre, or pop some corn for yourself at home, take a moment to examine those exploded pieces of corn shrapnel. One thing you’ll notice is that every piece of popcorn is unique – like snowflakes, no two are ever the same.
Yet, they all start out looking pretty similar in size and shape, and there is absolutely no way known to science that can predict the finished shape any given kernel of corn will adopt once it goes through that glorious pop!
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Sales & Marketing
facebook, instant personalization, marketing
Yesterday, I posted the first part of this article on marketing (Photography Marketing Is Not Dead Yet), with the premise that many photographers are apparently still stuck in the old mode of thinking when it comes to the subject of marketing; the old methods are far less effective now than they used to be, and it’s time for a change…
Welcome To The [Social] Machine
The dawn of the social web is here; actually, it’s been here a while now and it’s already mid-morning, but there’s still time to hop on board before lunchtime.
The long and the short of it is that consumers no longer want to be marketed to – they’re fed up with being assaulted at every turn with commercials, advertisements, pop-ups and junk mail. I’m sure, as consumers ourselves, we can totally understand this position. Instead, our customers want to become part of the marketing and, through the socialization of the web, they’re able to do just that by trusted peer-to-peer recommendations.
Times have changed rapidly over the last few years – interruptive marketing methods are no longer effective, and we have to make the switch to permission-based, collaborative methods that revolve around the nucleus of the social sphere in which we now operate.
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Sales & Marketing
facebook, LinkedIn, marketing strategy, photography marketing, social media, twitter
Do you know what your clients and prospects are saying about you? How about your competitors? Are you aware of how your brand is perceived outside your studio walls?
Your photography business is a brand, whether or not you’ve consciously decided to brand yourself. In fact, as photographers, most of us are our own brand. Branding as we used to know it used to be something that larger corporations would engage in, and was mostly fuelled by advertising – TV, radio, newspapers, magazines etc. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Calvin Klein, Levi and the rest were all major players in their respective industries, with their branding determined mostly by their powerful advertising.
Not any more.
The onslaught of social media has changed all that forever. Interruptive advertising (radio, TV, newspapers and magazines) has declined sharply in both reach and effectiveness, replaced instead by a more permission-based form of marketing through social media and peer-to-peer recommendation. It has become harder for companies to market to us directly, but easier for people to adopt the role of brand evangelists.
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branding, facebook, google alerts, photography marketing, social media, social oomph
SEO For Photographers – The Value Of Inbound Links
Most of you reading this who have a photography web site understand the importance of inbound links when it comes to SEO, and having your own site rank higher in the search engines. The more links we have pointing to us, the better (generally speaking).
I’m sure you also realize that some links are better than others and we’re always looking for “quality links”; that is, links from well-ranked, trusted and respectable sites that are relevant to our own business.
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Photography Website SEO
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Do you send out a monthly email newsletter for your photography business? If so, kudos to you, this is another great way to “touch” your clients and prospects each month to keep your photography studio and your brand on their radar.
Perhaps the idea raises thoughts of, “I’d love to, but that’s all I need – more administrative work to keep me away from taking photographs!”
But then again, we need people in front of our cameras, right? In order to get those people where we want them to be, we need to market our services and get their attention. Not only that, we need to keep their attention once we’ve earned it.
If you aren’t sending out a newsletter, there are plenty of reasons why you should. Before I committed to sending one out myself, like many others, I was expecting Facebook, Twitter and my blog to do all the work that a newsletter should do. After all, it’s no big task to write a short blog entry to announce special portrait sessions. Adding a status update to Facebook is easier still and as for Twitter, well anyone can write 140 characters in their sleep, right? Plus, those things are a lot more fun than writing a newsletter – that sounds too much like being a journalist.
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Personally, I have a hard time fully adopting the word “Likers”, preferring instead the original and more pedestrian term “Fans”. Facebook fans, that is.
Photographers are working hard to capture as many fans as they can, perhaps feeling that having more fans (no matter who or where they are) must be a good thing. The same thing plays out on Twitter, too, where the volume of followers is [mistakenly] perceived as more important than the quality.
Anyway, I digress already, the topic of acquiring fans can be the subject of a whole other post…
The question of the moment is “How do we keep the fans we have? Especially the ones we actually want… How do we keep them happy so they won’t leave?”
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The week ending March 13th 2010 was an apparent and important milestone in the world of social media networking, when Facebook surpassed Google in the count of most site visits in a week in the United States (full story can be read here. This was not the first time that Facebook overtook Google, but it was the first week-long victory, and it has the potential to become permanent.
As the number of subscribers to Facebook continues to grow, with the “population” of Facebook being compared to that of actual countries, it may be no surprise to see it become the most-visited site on the web. After all, the “Google” population is able to grow only as more people gain access to the internet, whereas Facebook still has a large pool of currently unregistered internet users to draw from. Eventually, the two populations might stabilize, but then the war really starts about who will attract the most visitors.
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Sales & Marketing
facebook, google, LinkedIn, social media, twitter
Do you have more Facebook friends than a new lottery winner? Do you tweet more than a caged canary on steroids? If so, then you are obviously on the social media bandwagon and loving it, which is supposed to be a good thing for our photography businesses, right?
Well, yes it’s a great thing, but…
As with everything useful in life, there’s usually a “but” that puts a wrench in the works. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends, family and clients (but please don’t tell us all what you’re having for dinner – we really don’t care), and it’s a wonderful place to showcase our work, perhaps in the hope of it going at least a teeny bit viral when our clients share it with their friends.
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copyright, facebook, marketing, photo-sharing, viral
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