Archive for Social Media
Are You Getting Results with Your Photography Website?
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This week Joseph Cristina and I discuss best practices for professional photographers’ websites and give you a quick tip to get your Facebook News Feed back.
We get questions all the time from photographers asking about website solutions. “Should I use a content management system (CMS) or is a Flash template ok? Do I need a blog? What about music in my slide shows?” We’ll answer these questions and more and give you our recommendations to create a functional and professional looking website that gets results.
If you’re one of the 500 million plus Facebook users out there, you may have noticed a change to your News Feed. You have a bunch of Friends and follow a bunch of Facebook Pages, but why aren’t you seeing updates from them anymore? Well Facebook made a change to your settings and by default shows you updates from the friends and Pages you interact with the most. We give you a quick tip to get your News Feed back to the way it was before.
I hope you enjoy the information and if you have any questions about running a photography business in the new media age please let us know. You can leave a comment below or send a question through our Contact form and we’ll try and answer it next week.
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Google +1… What it Means for Your Photography Business
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Google recently announced their new experimental project called the Google +1 Button. The +1 Button is similar to the Facebook Like button and will be seen on websites and in Google search results. +1ing a website, post, search result, ad, etc. will show its popularity to your Google community and the world and will most definitely help with SEO. If you want to get in on the +1 Button experiment you can register at the Google Experimental site.
If you’re not familiar with TrueTwit.com, it is a web based service that provides validation for Twitter followers. Those that sign up for the service will be able to verify “real” people form “bots” to help avoid Twitter spam.
Joseph Cristina from Allure Multimedia and I had a conversation about the Google +1 Button and TrueTwit.com. We speak on a regular basis about all kinds of photo industry topics as well as social media, website design and anything else that comes up. Just for fun we decided to record our conversation to share our thoughts of these services with the community. Our conversation lasted a little over 34 minutes so you’ll want to grab a cup of coffee 
I hope you enjoy it and feel free to leave your thoughts below.
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45 Minutes of Daily Social Media Marketing
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Social Media marketing is still very much in it’s infancy and one of the questions many people ask me is how much time they should spend on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
My answer is normally something like “how long is a piece of string?” but of course that isn’t very helpful. The key to success in regards to social media is keeping things social and to always remember that you get out what you put in (eventually).
There’s no quick fix solution or magic tool which will get you thousands of followers overnight. In fact anything claiming to do such a thing is certainly worth steering clear of.
This week’s marketing campaigns for photographers is designed to help business owners manage their social media time more effectively.
45 minutes of daily social media marketing
What would happen if you dedicated 45 minutes a day to social networking?
Would 45 minutes a day be less time than you already spend on social networks?
Here’s what you can do in 45 minutes Read More→
Marketing Campaigns for Photographers – #archiveday
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This is the third in our series looking at different marketing campaigns for photographers.
Also in this series:
If you have any campaign ideas or suggestions then please use the comments or email me at info@photocreative365.com
Marketing Campaigns for Photographers #4 #archiveday
This week we’re looking at another social media based marketing campaign but this time we’re using Twitter.
#archiveday was the hashtag suggested just a couple of weeks ago by New Media Photographer’s Rosh Sillars.
You can see the original post here - What is #archiveday?
The idea of retweeting old blog posts isn’t a new one. I certainly like to make a habit of it as does Trevor here at Current Photographer. But setting aside a specific day where you share old posts can bring a lot more traffic to your website. Read More→
Remember, Your Clients Are Reading… by Tracey Brown
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With the onset of Facebook, Twitter and blogs, we have to keep in mind that everything we post as photographers WILL BE READ. Over time I have noticed that with these outlets it is so easy to get too comfortable with what we put out there. Regardless of our true feelings about any situation especially when it comes to clients, both past, current and potential, we must always come across as positive.
Case in point, I had a wedding that I was so looking forward to as it was an out of town location with great scenery. I was particularly looking forward to capturing some shots with my clients at some of the local attractions. But the entire day was a complete wash out and I pretty much ended up with nothing. Truth be told, the day was a wreck. My hair got wet, a guest knocked my Lightsphere off of my flash in the rush to get out of the rain and the videographer was a total nuisance! Read More→
It’s Not the Size of Your Following That Matters, It’s How You Use It: by Chris Horner
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There’s a common misconception in social media that the more followers or likes you have, the more influential you are or the higher your chances of making a bazillion dollars online with little to no work. There seems to be a race to get the most followers and likes with little or no thought to the endgame. Oftentimes people think that if they have a million followers that a million people are looking at their work and that will automatically lead to sales.
Well, no. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way.
In this article, I’m going to look at Twitter and Facebook pages as they might be used for a business, and share some insights into growing an online community that has value.
First, as with any new endeavor, decide what your goals are. Why do you want to use social media? To keep in touch with customers and prospects? To network with peers? Answering these questions will help you determine the crowd that you want to attract. Read More→
How To Set Up Your Facebook Profile and Photo Album Privacy Settings: by Georgia McCabe
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This is a video tutorial on how to set up your Facebook Privacy Settings. A complete walk through including how to make your photographs private.
10 Tips To Get on the Twitter ‘Suggested for You’ List of Your Prospects
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In August 2010, Twitter launched a service called “Suggestions for You” to make the process of finding new people to follow a little easier. The algorithms suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. When you login to Twitter.com you’ll see the suggestions on the right side of your Twitter feed and in the Find People section. You’ll also see recommendations for similar users when you view another account’s profile. If there is a user that you’re not interested in following you can click the X button and they won’t show them to you again.
This new service undoubtedly was inspired by Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature. I’ve found many old friends on Facebook this way and I’m sure Twitter saw the value this feature holds and rolled it into their set of tools. Third party developers will be able to take advantage of this new feature soon through a new API so look for it to roll out in the applications you’re already using.
So “Suggestions for You” is a great way to find people to follow on Twitter, but it can also be a great way for other people to find you. Now more than ever it’s important to be following the types of people that you want as clients and to be Tweeting about things that they’re interested in.
On the Twitter support page titled “Suggestions For You – Discover Who to Follow!” at the very bottom of the page under the heading “Where do you get these Suggestions from? I need more followers, how do I get you to suggest me to other users?” they list a few bullet points: Read More→
The Photographer’s Social Media Checklist
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Social Media offers some great opportunities to help build awareness for your photography business. Getting your name out where your potential customers are is the first step in gaining new business. Three proven target areas to focus on are your website, Facebook and Twitter profiles. To make sure you don’t miss out on opportunities, I’ve put together a simple checklist of things you should be doing to help build your social media presence.
Building Your Photog “Tweet” Cred
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So you’ve gone ahead and created your very own Twitter account. You’re hoping to spread the word of your work and boost traffic to your website, blog, and maybe even cash flow. A few days, some weeks, a couple of months… they all go by but nothing is really happening. What should you do? Write Twitter off as a failure? Chalk it up to a misfired experiment? Nah. I think there is an interesting dynamic when you first create your Twitter account and the time shortly thereafter. That is to say, there are some noticeable phases or progressions that one goes through as they try to establish themselves as a resource for other photographers. I’ve gone through these phases in my attempt to be viewed as a credible HDR photography resource and I’m sure that everyone else has gone through similar paths to get to where they are.
Along the way of wading through your own Twitterverse field, you pick up slivers of ideas that either jive well or don’t. The key to navigating through this field is two-fold: the first revolves around how well you can actually pick up on these slivers and the second revolves around how effectively you deal with and manage them.
So, this is my attempt to share some of the practices that I religiously follow and wholly attribute to getting to where I am now and to how I have been able to meet, and shoot with, some of the most talented, fantastic, and generally great people in the industry. Read More→
