How To Use Social Media For Photography Business

October 22, 2010 @ 1:48PM

How To Use Social Media For Photography Business

By Damien Franco

The following is a guest post by Kyle Miller who shares Photography Tips on his blog. He has been a professional photographer for several years.

As a professional photographer I’m always looking for ways to get more business and improve the relationship with my existing clients. One way I’ve done this is with creative uses of social media. Here is one example:

What I Used To Do:

When I finish editing photos for a client I used to send an email over telling them it’s done along with a location on where to find it online. I would occasionally get a couple leads come in from the clients that would share this link with their friends, but it was rare.

What I Do Now:

Now what I do is send an email over to the location of the edited photos but I also include pre-built links to share the location on Facebook and Twitter. By creating the links for the client in advance and including them in the email I’ve seen a big uptick in traffic to my professional photography website from client friends that were interested in who took the pictures. By making it easy on the client to share my work it’s helped improve my business with very little effort. Now I’ve had several leads come in from people telling me that they saw us on Facebook.

Another Example – Turning Clients Into Affiliates:

I encourage clients to share their photos with their friends and family on Facebook and offer a $100 credit worth of photos for any new client that they refer to us. This is another great way of getting business that costs me far less to acquire the client than attending a wedding show or using traditional advertising means. This works well because a referral from a friend is always much more valuable than a referral from any other source.

How Do You Use Social Media?

These are just a couple of the ways I’ve used social media to improve my business. How do you use social media to promote your photography?

Photograph iBook by Scott Hussey

Comments

Anonymous

1 year ago

how do you develop those prebuilt links to automatically post on FB and twitter? I've tried looking online but can't figure out how. Any suggestions?

Anonymous

1 year ago

Is this for a blog? What platform are you using?

Anonymous

1 year ago

Yes, I will typically post several pictures in a blog post for high school senior photos and I always email the senior and their parent that they can view the blog post. I include the link directly to my website and the blog post URL. I'd love to be able to send them a link that would automatically ask them to post my blog post link to their FB wall like is said in this post. thanks for any help you can give!

Anonymous

1 year ago

oh and I'm using Windows XP but why would my computer platform matter? Isn't it just a case of setting up the html link?

Anonymous

1 year ago

I'm sorry...I meant what blogging platform are you using; wordpress, blogger, etc?

Anonymous

1 year ago

I host my site through squarespace.com. I just want to be able to send a link in an email to a client so that the blog post I wrote about them is posted to their FB wall like this blog post talks about. Not sure how to make these pre-built links to share. thanks!

Anonymous

1 year ago

So this seams like a two step process with squarespace.

First, you'll need to upload a code snippet or widget that creates a facebook link for that particular post or article. There were a couple that I found by googling "squarespace facebook share" and squarespace facebook plugin". Which one you end up using will depend on your comfortableness with CSS and coding.

Then I think you'll want to copy the link address of the facebook link that was created for that particular article and paste it into the email preceded by a call to action like "Share this on facebook!" or something similar. This should work (in theory).

I don't use squarespace so I'm not sure if there is an easier option. That was what I was able to find.

If anyone uses squarespace or has a better idea I bet Mike would love to hear it!

Anonymous

1 year ago

Thanks Damien! I'll give that a try and let you know how it comes out!

Anonymous

1 year ago

Great idea to pre-build links for the client to share on facebook. How do you actually do that tho?

Anonymous

1 year ago

There are plugins for different blogging platforms that will do that for you. You'll have to search them out.

If you're using a self hosted wordpress I probably recommend a "share this plugin" or the "tweetme" plugin and "facebook like" plugin.