Professional Photo Lab and Photo Printing Blog

Georgia McCabe takes us through some useful tips and tricks for optimizing Facebook activities. Interesting ways for navigating Facebook and for getting the most for your efforts. As an author, speaker, trainer and social media and photography evangelist, her perspectives entitled “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Friends…or Enemies” appear in print in the book entitled The Relationship Age, with social media guru Mari Smith. Georgia is a frequent guest blogger for our photo lab.

By now, saying you need to be marketing on social networking sites is like saying “don’t forget to blink.” Everyone knows they need to do it. The opportunity social marketing presents is enormous: the people you know help spread your message to the people they know, vastly expanding your reach. Most social media marketing is free or very low cost, and often — once you set up your accounts or pages — marketing efforts don’t take a lot of time.

The most obvious social sites for marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. MySpace has become less relevant to some audiences — but if your customers are there, then you should be there, too. LinkedIn is important if you’re doing any sort of commercial photography, such as products, ads, corporate portraits or headshots for models or actors. While Flickr is an obvious site for photographers, chances are most of your potential customers can be found on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

All social sites are most effective when used together, as a system. Have a new video on your YouTube channel? Tweet it, update your Facebook status about it, and share it on LinkedIn.

Facebook, of course, is the behemoth of social networks — and therefore, a critical site for marketing. You shoot a wedding, and both you and the bride get the images up on Facebook. Now, your beautiful work is on display in front of all your friends and fans. But more importantly, it’s being shown and touted by the bride — who, like every bride before her, cannot stop talking about her wedding. Instead of telling 5 or 10 people she knows in real life how dazzled she is by your pictures of her special day, she’s now sharing that with her 300 Facebook friends. Some of them are going to need a photographer too — and suddenly, on her recommendation, they’re looking specifically for you.

Social sites are invaluable tools for creating a community and building word-of-mouth sales. They are also excellent delivery vehicles for more direct marketing approaches. Any time you have a press release, a blog post, a new photo gallery, a video, or anything else that can build your audience, you should be using all your social sites to spread the word. Keep in mind, the more valuable the content is to your audience, the more likely it is they will share it with others.

Here are a few specific ideas:

• Make a video of the hottest new trends in senior portraits. Then spread the word that viewers can choose the poses they like best in the video for their upcoming portrait session.
• Send out a tweet offering a portrait discount to any of your Twitter followers who retweet your message within the next 12 hours.
• Do a “smile of the month” contest on Facebook with your latest image gallery (this is a great way to get your clients talking about you on their Facebook pages!)
• Do a series of blog posts on how your clients can take better pictures of their pets.
• Send a tweet every day — or several times a day — on new photo products or photography-related headlines.

With a little thought and creativity, you can create a network of people happy to spread your marketing message for you — to a constantly growing circle of potential clients.

Be sure to check out our other posts on social marketing, including “Boost your Professional Photography Business with Facebook Advertising.”

Guest Post By Georgia McCabe

Georgia outlines some quick tips to help professional photographers get the most from Facebook with tricks for uploading longer posts and images, as well as surmounting some of its limitations.

Facebook has more than 500 million active users and 50% of their active users log on to Facebook in any given day. (An active user is someone who has been on the site in the past 30 days.) People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook and it is in millions of homes around the globe.

Facebook originally started their advertising program on November 6, 2006.  “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation with social media.”

Some photographers are familiar with internet advertising options on Google and other platforms, Facebook ads work much the same as other PPC or Pay Per Click ads do, but there are a few significant differences. Facebook allows you to narrow your ads to be seen by more specific demographic (i.e. Age, Sex, Location and often interest).  On Facebook, targeting with keywords is optional, but highly recommended.

Facebook ads are delivered direct to your target audience right on their profile pages. Compared to Google ads, on Facebook there are fewer advertisers which means less competition for your photography business. This is also relevant because it can cost you much less per click – a better return on your investment.

Additionally, people can “Like” your advertisements, which can produce a snowball effect. If you’re seeking to drive traffic to your photography studio’s website, Facebook Fan Page, Profile Page event, group or application, Facebook Advertising may be your ideal solution. (more…)

A Picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps even more on your Facebook page. What does your profile picture say about who you are. First impressions make a huge difference in social media and that profile picture is all you get to introduce yourself to others. Make it count! As an author, speaker, trainer and social media and photography evangelist, her perspectives entitled “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Friends…or Enemies” appear in print in the book entitled The Relationship Age, with social media guru Mari Smith. Georgia is a frequent guest blogger for our photo lab

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