If you’re a photographer, chances are you’re on Instagram. If you’re not, get on there now before it’s too late! Instagram has grown to become one of the largest social media platforms in just a few short years. The last statistic that was published announced that there were over 400 million active users, which means if you’re not on the platform, you’re losing out on reaching potential clients!
There are several steps that every senior photography business should be taking on Instagram to help bring their social media presence to the next level. Social media is a great way to extend your brand presence and reach a large audience. Plus, as a senior photographer, EVERY senior is on social media and I have yet to photograph a senior that hasn’t been on Instagram. This is a huge way to reach this market and I feel is the social media platform that has the most potential reach for this demographic at this point in time.
The first thing that you should be doing with you business’ Instagram account is identifying who your target market is. This is who you would think of as your target client and figuring out what type of content to post that relates to them. The best way to think about this is asking yourself the question “What would they want to see?” Most of the time this isn’t your personal photos unless these are inherent to your brand identity! For a majority of businesses, this isn’t the case however. The best way to fix this is to separate your business and personal Instagram accounts.
A lot of my followers don’t want to see my personal life – and I’m ok with that! I choose not to post this content since it’s not what my audience wants to see necessarily. When you first begin to post the content that your target audience wants to see, you might see that you begin to lose some followers. Don’t worry about that! I would rather lose followers that will never be clients and gain followers that I could potentially turn into clients than cater to those that will never help my business grow. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that the number of followers you have means nothing to how successful you are in business.
This all leads into making sure you stay consistent with the content you’re posting! The biggest part about this is that in order to see success in the future, you must stay true to posting content meant for your ideal audience. This means that if you’re looking to be a high school senior photographer, stop posting photos of your family or newborn photography and default to only posting your senior work. This is huge because your audience needs to know what to expect of your social media account.
By having a large mix of genres displayed on your Instagram account, many users will be confused about what type of photography you do and thus leads to them contacting you about all sorts of jobs that you have no desire in doing! By keeping your content relevant to what you want to photograph, this leads to you acquiring more jobs in your desired genre since your clients know to expect a certain kind of work from you. In addition, you also want to show consistency in the quality of the work you’re posting. While many photographers only want to showcase their best image from the session, I oftentimes will try and post a variety of images from a given session. This shows that I have the capability of producing more than one or two good images from a session. I like to put collages together with images from my full sessions and post them to Instagram to show the consistency of work that I produce.
Your social media pages are an extension of your brand. By showing this consistency in terms of the quality of work you’re posting and what type of content you’re posting, this will attract followers because they value the type of work you’re producing. The biggest part of being a successful brand on Instagram is to understand that consistency is key – people don’t like change! Using your social media accounts to show them what type of work you create and what they should expect as a client is huge and something I think Instagram is wonderful at communicating to them as long as your execute this correctly.
The next biggest mistake that I see on Instagram are accounts that don’t provide their users enough value! What I mean by value is the type of content that they want to see or can relate to. This might be in the form of photos from a recent session, quote cards (i.e. inspirational quote overlaid on an image you took), behind the scenes photos from during a shoot or maybe a back of the camera image. What doesn’t bring clients value is when you post an advertisement. While sometimes you need to do this in business (every business does!), you need to bring disproportional value to them before posting an ad. This means that if you know you’ll need to be posting an ad, you should have previously posted lots of content that they want to see.
Your feed shouldn’t be littered with advertisements with discounted sessions, mini-sessions or whatever else you’re running as a promotion to try and bring in new business. The thing that you don’t want to do is make your audience feel like they’re being advertised to by following you. They follow you to see the images that you produce! Nobody likes being advertised to and your account shouldn’t become an advertising platform. This is a big turnoff to your potential and current followers and will just lead to them becoming unhappy with what you’re posting and lead to them not following you and potential lost business.
Another must-do on your Instagram account is figure out what the right mix of content is for your followers. This will be different for every user. The best way to get an idea of this is to look at your engagement from past posts. Engagement is when your followers like and comment on your work. Posts with higher engagement levels will give you a good understanding of the type of followers that you have on your profile and what they like to see from you! On average, photos will have the highest engagement levels and advertisements will have the lowest. Hmm… Go figure. This means that you should be posting more content with higher engagement that content with lower engagement.
However, you also need to mix it up. By posting the same content all the time, this doesn’t add any diversity to your profile and will eventually become boring to your followers. Diversity doesn’t mean not staying consistent – it just means posting content that isn’t all the same, but still relates to your target audience! For example, if I’ve posted a lot of photos, I might switch it up by posting a quote card or short video for example. This keeps your followers engaged and coming back to see what you’re going to post next.
And lastly, the biggest mistake that I see being made is not engaging with your followers! Engaging is commenting and liking not only with those that they follow but also with their followers. This means that if someone comments on a post, reply with a comment and “@ mention” them. None of us are so busy that we cannot take the time to reply to a follower that comments on an image. Thank them for stopping by and taking their time to comment on your image! The biggest thing is to reply in a natural way. If they comment on a specific part of the image, consider incorporating something related to this in your comment. This adds authenticity to your brand and shows that you’re listening to them and appreciate their time. I truly believe that engagement is the single best way to show your followers that you’re thankful for their time and truly appreciate their support.
These steps are the exact steps that I have taken in my business. There aren’t any secrets to running a successful Instagram account. It really all boils down to providing your followers with the content they want to see and engaging with them. By doing these exact steps I mentioned above, I truly believe that Instagram has been the single best platform in allowing me to grow my business and reach clients that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I hope that these tips bring you success! What takeaways did you have from this article that you think will help your Instagram presence? In addition, leave a comment below letting me know how these tips have helped you become more successfully running your Instagram!
Sean Brown is a photographer based out of Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR specializing in high school senior portrait photography. Sean believes that photography should be personal and that each person should come away with images that reflect themselves and who they are as a person. Sean enjoys working with people and embraces the challenge of capturing each person’s personality in a different, unique way that’s true to who they are at this point in their life.
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