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.

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.

The open house at our photo lab this Monday was a great success! Here’s a video of some of the highlights:

Once again Facebook has unilaterally improved (changed) their user interface and its capabilities. Like it or not it’s a whole new ballgame…again! Georgia takes you through a quick update of the changes.  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.

H&H Color Lab customer Blair Phillips shares a blog post and video with us today. Blair and Suzanne are the owners of Blair Phillips Photography in Landis, NC. In business for five years, they specialize in seniors, weddings, child/family, newborn/maternity and boudoir. They do it all….couture style! You can find them on FaceBook, Twitter, and on the Blair Phillips Blog.

Upon completing a huge marketing campaign, the natural thing to do is to sit back, take a deep breath and take it easy.

Well, that’s not exactly the case here at Blair Phillips Photography. We’ve just completed our high school senior season and we surpassed every goal we set, which is amazing, especially with this economy. With the last click of the shutter and my Nikon D3 feeling overworked (and under paid), we went back to the drawing board and immediately started planning for the next high school senior season. There’s a new philosophy this year that is a tried and true way to reach high school seniors in a way that gives us more connection, feedback and immediate excitement toward a session with us.

Facebook, of course, is one of our main avenues for reaching and contacting our high school seniors and we’re not content with simple text updates any more. So, we have been utilizing our HD video capable DSLR to produce short, to the point videos that visually share information to our seniors rather than using text posts. When we recently launched our 2012 Senior Ambassador program, not only did we post a teaser video to our wall for all of our high school senior fans to see but we also sent prospect Ambassadors a link to our Vimeo account where they could watch a password protected video giving them details about being a Senior Ambassador, what we have to offer and what’s in it for them. The “Exclusive” password protected video helped reiterate the fact that our Ambassador program is very selective and it helps make the senior feel even more chosen.

The “Net Generation” is 100 times more likely to watch a quick video than read paragraph after paragraph. It’s hardwired in them and it’s not their fault. It is just the culture they have grown up in. But there are some exceptions. You can’t just sit a camera up on a tripod, say a couple of lines and expect 200 seniors to come pouring in the doors. A video, geared toward a high school senior, must have plenty of movement and stay around 2 minutes long, if not shorter. The attention span of a high school senior is rather short these days so anything longer than 2 minutes is usually never finished, especially if it’s just a talking head. Incorporate some filler shots and footage to help fill in the gaps and to help maintain their attentions.

Another tip when creating videos where seniors are targeted is be very specific. Don’t try to cover 3 or 4 different programs in one video. Create 3 or 4 separate videos that highlight each program separately. By having different videos for different purposes, we’ve been able to target a more specific audience much more effectively without throwing too much at them all at once.

As of the moment, we have only created videos for our senior market but we do plan to do more videos touching each of our target markets. You better believe we will share them with you once they are finished too. Until then, take a look at our Senior Ambassador video below and try using video rather than text posts or updates. Video cameras are so affordable these days and with many DSLR’s equipped with video capabilities, it’s easier than ever.

Just imagine how much more enjoyable if this would have been explained in a video!