It doesn’t work, but I still do it. Sigh…
Are you confused about how to use social media as a photographer? Do you have personal accounts but not business accounts? Do you struggle to understand the difference between all the platforms? Would you like to get started but don’t know how?
I know how you feel. I would’ve answered yes to all those questions a few years ago. I had a Twitter account and a Facebook account, but I mostly used them for publishing links to newspaper articles or telling the occasional (bad) joke! I also worked as a private tutor as well as a photographer, so I wasn’t sure how to manage the two on social media.
Fortunately, that’s all changed now. I did my research and gained a few years’ experience using all the major platforms. Eventually Expert Photography even asked me to write an ebook about it! Social Success Strategies tells you all about the various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and 500px. If you’re looking for guidance, it’ll tell you the pros and cons of each of them, how to get started and what to post. It’ll also give you a few bonus tips for social media success in a few different areas:
adapting your strategy for each platform
maximising your time on each of the major networks
automating social media
common mistakes
collaborating on social media
keeping your images safe
copyright
I’m not going to go through all that again here. What I want to do is just set a few expectations based on my own experience.
How much will it cost?
The good news is that building a social media presence doesn’t have to cost you a penny. It’s free to set up an account with all the major sites, and there are no hidden extras or add-ons.
That said, you can obviously choose to accelerate your progress by paying for adverts or hiring someone to produce content and/or manage your social media presence. To my mind, that’s not really necessary—at least in the early days. I’d simply pick one or two platforms and do all the work yourself.
As time goes on, you might want to run an advertising campaign or two, and you’ll obviously have to pay for that. However, it’s pretty easy to set up ads on Facebook, for instance, and you can start small by boosting a post for as little as a dollar a day.
If you think you need someone to help you manage the process, you can always buy ads through a marketing or ad agency. I did that myself last year when I bought ads on Facebook to increase subscriptions to my education website. I was selling access to over 20,000 past papers and mark schemes, and I wanted to grow the business. It worked pretty well, but I eventually stopped when the agency tried to raise their prices…!
If you just can’t be bothered with the daily grind of social media posting or you feel your time would be better spent actually taking pictures and talking to clients, then you always have the option of hiring a social media manager. It doesn’t have to be a full-time position, and you might even have a friend who could help on a part-time basis in exchange for lunch or a bottle of wine.
How hard is it to master?
Well, it depends on what type of person you are and what experience you have. If you already have personal accounts on social media and are comfortable posting pictures and other content, you should be fine. There are lots of potential complications, including optimal image dimensions, choice of content and posting schedules, but the skills you need are fairly basic.
Most platforms do pretty well at ‘holding your hand’ when you get started, and if you can’t do something, you can usually Google the problem to find out how to do it.
To give you an idea, this is my social media posting schedule:
Monday to Saturday: Publish Instagram story with picture and link to Prints page on website, publish carousel of 10 images on Instagram, change Facebook cover photo and publish ‘how to’ post on various Facebook photography groups with contact details for booking lessons.
Saturday: Write article on photography (like this one!) on my website and publish description and link on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest.
Sunday: Post Shot of the Week on my website and Instagram, then publish description and link on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
As and when: Repost any ‘mentions’ on Instagram as a ‘story’
Until recently, I published exactly the same content on all channels, but I’ve now begun to tailor it based on the advice of Jeff Brown, my new photography mentor! He encouraged me to target different markets with each platform, so here’s how I decided to divvy them up:
Facebook: Attract possible customers for lessons, courses and workshops.
Instagram: Sell framed prints
LinkedIn: Develop corporate clients
My social media strategy is not quite the finished article, but at least knowing what I’m trying to do on each platform is a good starting point. Now I just have to make up my mind what to do on Twitter and Pinterest…!
Getting back to the main question, the most important thing is to be clear in your mind exactly why you want to use social media. That means setting a measurable goal and coming up with a strategy that you think will enable you to reach it. That will involve many different steps, and you might need some advice along the way if marketing is not really your thing!
Here are a few of the key questions you’ll need to answer:
What is my overall social media goal?
How do I measure progress towards that goal?
How can I monetise my content?
What types of content should I publish?
What is my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy?
What should be my posting schedule?
What’s my financial budget?
How much time should I spend on social media?
Which platforms should my business be on?
What should my usernames be?
etc, etc…
Once you’ve come up with a plan, you can set up your social media accounts, complete your profile and start posting…
How do I measure success?
One of your most important jobs is to put in place a meaningful feedback mechanism to allow you to measure your progress. Yes, it’s nice to get ‘likes’ and ‘followers’, but they don’t pay the bills…!
And don’t worry, I’m not talking about complicated jargon like NPV, IRR or discount rates. You just need a simple metric to keep track of what you’re putting in and what you’re getting out—and it has to be measured in cold, hard cash!
Now, you might say that social media platforms are free, so it doesn’t cost anything, but that doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost of your time (as well as the cost of any ads or specialist advice). Every time you post on social media, you’re prevented from doing anything else as a photographer, and that means you can’t earn any income from it.
To measure the cost of this, you could come up with a complicated calculation based on day rates and probability and all kinds of other factors, but it’s probably better to use a standard hourly rate. It would be unfair to use the rate you charge clients as every single hour of your working life isn’t chargeable! However, you could simply divide your annual photography revenue by the number of hours you spend working on the business.
When it comes to the revenue side, there are similar problems. This time, you need to work out what the payback is from your social media presence. And how do you do that, exactly…?! If you sell a print, is that because the buyer saw one of your Facebook posts? If a client books a shoot, is that because of a YouTube video you uploaded? If a picture editor downloads one of your images from a stock agency site, is that because of an Instagram post?
These questions are almost impossible to answer, but you can get some idea of the impact of your social media activity by keeping track of whatever data you can get your hands on. That might mean asking clients how they heard about your business or running a special offer on social media with a discount code that you can then track.
All this is as long as a piece of string. I used to be a strategy consultant, so I’m happy making lists and using spreadsheets to work out financial ratios, but there’s nothing wrong with starting small and coming up with simple metrics that work for you.
How long will it take?
Patience is a virtue, as they say, and that’s certainly true when you’re waiting for payback from social media! To be fair, you should start to get likes and followers immediately—if only in small numbers. However, SEO only really works in the long run, which means months or even years, so you’ll need to set your expectations at a reasonable level.
To give you an idea, let me give you a few figures. I’ve worked as a photographer for 10 years, and I benchmark myself against some well-known competitors to see how I’m doing. On Facebook, I have 3,972 page likes. Here are the equivalent figures for a few other wildlife photographers:
Federico Veronesi Wildlife Photography: 7.3K
Andy Skillen Photography: 7.1K
Paul Goldstein: 25.5K
David Yarrow Photography: 109K
David Lloyd Wildlife Photography: 396.1K
As you can see, I have quite a way to go to match the best in the business—and that’s just Facebook likes…!
Will it work?
Ay, there’s the rub. I have a presence on all the major social media websites, and I now have a fairly good following on most of them (except Flickr, Threads, Vero and X):
500px (263 followers, 128.7k photo likes, 5.8m photo impressions)
Facebook (4.9k followers, 14.7k engagement, 307.6k reach in last 28 days), manage Wildlife Photographers group (203.6k members)
Flickr (9 followers)
Instagram (219 accounts engaged, 4k accounts reached, 17k followers in last 30 days)
LinkedIn (1.2k connections, 2.3k followers, 4.9k engagements, 85.4k post impressions in last 28 days), Nick Dale Safari & Wildlife Photography company page (56 followers, 106 post impressions), Wildlife Photography group (148 members and 1.0k active members)
Pinterest (4.0k engaged audience, 86k total audience, 117k impressions in last 30 days)
Threads (656 followers)
TikTok (159 followers, 6.1k likes, 14.3k reached audience and 14.7k video views in last four weeks)
Vero (4 followers)
X (54 followers)
YouTube (598 hours watch time, 107.0k views, 50.5k subscribers in last 28 days)
Having said that, I just don’t have the data available to tell you what impact my social media presence has had on sales. Admittedly, I’ve never tried to design a marketing campaign to work out that relationship, and I’ve never used trackable discount codes. However, it’s still a very difficult question to answer.
The closest I came was when I ran my Facebook marketing campaign to sell past paper subscriptions. That definitely moved the needle on sales, but the high set-up cost meant that it probably lost me money overall.
Now, I stick to
Verdict
Social media platforms give you a free and easy way to reach a worldwide audience, but can they actually help you grow your business and make it more profitable? Well, you’ll never find out unless you try!
My social media presence has grown considerably over the last 10 years and so have my revenues. I know correlation doesn’t prove causation, but every little helps. A good way to think about it is to treat social media as the cheapest form of advertising you can buy. Although I can’t prove any kind of link between specific posts and specific sales, it certainly raises the profile of my brand.
Here’s my overall view of each of the platforms:
Facebook: You can publish any kind of post, include text, images and video, and Facebook groups are a great way to improve your reach.
Instagram: People will often ask what my Instagram handle is, so it’s important to have one, and it’s obviously the most photo-orientated site. However, the number of my followers hasn’t changed in 10 years, you need to post daily to boost traffic and it’s almost impossible to monetise. When I tried Instagram Shopping, I spent months trying to set it up and didn’t make a single sale!
LinkedIn: Hundreds of people have asked to ‘connect’ with me, but that’s generally been to do with education rather than photography. I get very few visitors on my company page, and I can’t see how it will help me develop my corporate business—no matter what Jeff Brown tells me...!
Pinterest: Unlike the other sites, where my audience is overwhelmingly male, this has a definite female skew. It’s supposed to be a place where people (especially American women) ‘pin’ pictures of products they’re interested in before actually making a purchase. That should make it a great place to find ‘hot’ leads, but, as far as I know, nobody’s ever bought a print after seeing it on Pinterest!
Twitter: I wouldn’t recommend Twitter for photographers. I like to think I’m a pretty good photographer, but only 18 Twitter users agree with me…!
YouTube: This offers a very good example of the difference between traffic and monetisation. I’ve had some incredible viewing figures for YouTube, and it’s largely down to a few videos a guest took of a buffalo being taken down by four male lions. We were on a game drive in the Serengeti National Park, and she kindly sent them to me afterwards. At first, it was very exciting to see them going viral, but then it became clear that I’d never make the threshold for monetisation as the video clips were too short! What a disappointment…
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.