One of the tasks that we need to be mindful of at the time of creating a business plan is our marketing strategy: From who is going to carry out campaigns (in case of do-it-ourselves or having to hire a team of professionals who do so), to the details and depth of customer service following the purchase of your final product, each of these points can quickly determine the failure or success of a starting, or even established business.
And without doubt, as the photographers we are, we must take full advantage of the benefits that digital technology offers; being, in this case, the social networks, that space where we can give impetus to our business, as long as we target the right market.
Table of Contents
There is no need to explain it: everyone has heard of Facebook. From its inception until today, Facebook has become a viral medium of communication – both newspapers, professionals… Everything is applicable to the vast spectrum of interactions provided by Facebook.
We may ask ourselves then… How can I best utilize Facebook to help establish a better photographic business?. It’s really quite easy: create a page for your photography studio. You’re not only showing your work, but you can also establish working links via messages.
What kind of ads can you do on your Facebook page?
The best times to post publications on Facebook are from Wednesday to Saturday, within hours between 1-4 pm, given that is the range of hours where we can attract more audience.
Another important aspect of customer care is messages on our page. If we can get a consistent rate in which we answer emails in a maximum period of 5 minutes, Facebook will add a badge to our profile signifying your quick response.
It is a native platform for many photographers – easily to share photos, add effects, make compositions thanks to applications like Layout and even power which can gain more audience using Hashtags, Instagram can provide us a space to display a virtual portfolio.
The essential aspects that we must learn with Instagram are primarily how to capture our desired target audience, and focusing our efforts to share content which is able to attract that specific audience. Using hashtags can help us to be selective; however, the following hashtags are running the photographic community in general:
As you can see, they are very generic hashtags and use of these can help us to increase the volume of spectators following our profile. Using tools such as Hashtagify, we can make searches more relevant, searching hashtags from keywords, with which we become a more select audience.
Another useful strategy is to follow large audience profiles, tagging on our publications to those profiles or using them as hashtags. Examples include: #gopro #natgeo and many others etc.
Make a strategy of committing to one or two posts per day during peak hours: 7-9 am and 4-6 pm. As a mobile platform, we can use pictures that we capture with our Smartphones, photographs downloaded to the Smartphone or directly resort to applications like Latergramme to schedule posts from our PC, and publish them at our convenience from virtually anywhere.
Pinterest is one of the most active platforms in Social Media these days. For those who do not know what this dynamic outlet is about, the idea is to create boards: on those boards, which we can name as we want, we post “Pins” which are images associated with different website links.
If you are using a business account, you can create what is known as “Rich Pins”, i.e., pins that have “Call-to-Action” such as “Read it” in the case of articles or blog posts, or even others that will allow us to sell products on Pinterest.
The greater the amount of content we have on Pinterest, the faster our number of followers will increase. Another good strategy is to write a good summary on each board, as to move up in the Ranks of the boards recommended by Pinterest. Summarily, if your board has too many pins in a short amount of time, Pinterest won’t label it as a Spam account, but as a Trendy account, which displays a large amount of interest.
In regards to the best times to share, it is important to bear in mind that Pinterest has its largest amount of traffic during weekends, which is normal considering the amount of time one can spend finding plenty of things to strike our interest. Any publication posted on a Saturday morning will have a higher likelihood of attracting a large audience.
More than a platform for interaction, Pinterest was intended as a social network where people could go to search for inspiration. You can showcase your work to potential clients, associate links with your web site, or simply enjoy the ideas of other photographers and professionals in the area. It is shown that profiles featuring different boards for inspiration are more likely to attract potential customers, as well as display your work samples so they can observe your personal style and find affinity. This was social network designed for recreation, but is also turning out to be a great place to enforce a business’s future in the long run.
There are other platforms of social media that we utilize as well, such as as Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube or 500px; however, with regards to these outlets we can say the following:
The important thing is to know about every platform on which you interact to make your mark: show your personal style, which will help customers to identify with your work philosophy. Hiring the services of a graphic designer to design templates for your profiles on Facebook and Pinterest is a winning idea: get a professional look to your profile for a small fee.
I hope this guide has been helpful and encouraging to explore more of the options that Social Media can bring to your business.
Please verify your software version before proceeding.
I’ve verified my software version
Facebook
Google +
Comments (0)
There are no comments yet.