Feb

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.

It’s not just about driving traffic to your website.
The chances are that you’re getting new followers every day and it’s unlikely that they have spent time trawling through your archives. In fact some of the best content on your site might have been posted months ago and only been viewed a handful of times.

I gave this campaign a go just this week and made some interesting discoveries. They’ll be a full breakdown of my results published tomorrow at photocreative365.com if you want to take a look.

Setting up

Go though your blog and pick some of your favourite posts.
It is important that what you’re tweeting is of interest to your followers so have a look at what has been Retweeted by your followers in the past.
Use HootSuite to schedule your tweets.
Pick a day that is already good for traffic – Mondays and Tuesdays are always good.
Be consistent with the spread of tweets. I did one tweet every half hour for 24 hours which worked quite well.
Make sure you add the #archiveday hashtag.
Let your followers know ahead of time the day you’ll be having an archive day.
A post like this is also handy if someone asks what the #archiveday hashtag is all about.

Tracking the effectiveness

Considering the little effort it takes to organise (I spent just over an hour setting up my tweets and kept an eye on Twitter during the day whilst editing) This campaign is fairly easy to track.

HootSuite Stats

All of my tweets on using the #archiveday hashtag were tracked in HootSuite. For my other tweets that day I used a different service. This meant that I could track the results from my #archiveday posts exclusively.

There are some pretty important things you can earn about your followers this way:

Firstly how many links were actually clicked
What countries your followers who click are from
What the most popular links were – you might also want to cross reference this data with the time you tweeted these specific links.

Your Site Stats

Obviously you’re going to look at your website or blog’s site stats but keep an eye on the soft bounces. Traffic might be above average but did your soft bounce percentage go up or down?

Twitter Stats

Did you make any new (relevant) followers? Were you added to any (relevant) lists during your #archiveday?

A few other things to think about

Even though you have scheduled your posts ahead of time it’s important that you are on call to answer questions on twitter and comments on your site.

This is not something that you want to do everyday….. I think you’ll find yourself losing a lot of good followers that way. I’d recommend that once a month is about the most you’d want to do.

2 tweets an hour works well but you might want to increase that at peak times. Make sure to space the tweets out evenly if you are going to do this.

Notes

Download our action plan sheet to help you get organised and create your own campaign.

Download Photographer Marketing Campaign Action Plan Sheet

For a little bit more guidance read the introductory article or this series:

Marketing Campaigns for Photographers

I’d love to know how you get on (as I know Rosh would too).

Have a great archive day!

I divide my time between being a photographer, retoucher, photography blogger and podcaster. Deep down I like to consider myself a portrait photographer and in my short 10 ten years in the business I’ve taken over 100,000 people’s studio portraits. When I’m not taking pictures I’m writing about it, most of my rambles can be found daily at http://photocreative365.com.