Photography and Social Media

I’ve always been a bit of a social media hound. You’ve heard me call myself an early adopter. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter.. you know the deal. If you are trying to do something positive for your business, or your craft, you have to be social. I was on Facebook so early, i was literally Facebooked out. Long before Fan Pages, and Groups and Like buttons. Nowadays, there are so many options for using Social Media sites to promote us as content providers. We actually have to use them, to tap in so to speak, in order to get the benefit of the exposure to our work and our brand it creates.

I’ve spent much time on this. With the release of my new website i had only a loose strategy as to how i was going to get traffic to my new site, and how i could get the word to spread about individual images, or series of images. i knew i wanted to use Sociables, a widget at the bottom of my posts that allow viewers to share to their favourite social media sites. I also knew that it was important to finally start a Fan Page and to use that part of Facebook for promotion. I have been a huge supporter of Twitter since 2008 and it has also fit in perfectly with how i use RSS feeds to automatically Tweet and post to my Facebook personal page and my Fan Page.

Flickr plays well with these other social sites especially us photographers. Some use Flickr as a dumping ground for all their work not good enough to make it to their website. My advice, get a pro account and make those galleries private. Show only your best, in every situation. I use Flickr to showcase certain portfolio images as well as share images i create with my iPhone 4.

RSS Feeds. Once you go WordPress you don’t go back. RSS has been one of the most important aspects of my new website. It’s how i manage subscribers and feed content into my Social Media sites. Email and RSS go together beautifully and with the release of the iPad, there are some nice readers to handle all your RSS feeds and they are displayed in an organic easy to digest way. Digesting content without actually visiting sites is something many have been adopting. Here is mine. Carty’s website feed

The hardest thing about this has been digesting the creation of a workflow for image or series of images in the social media. You do an amazing session. It needs to go into your portfolio. It needs to get onto your website. Facebook? Twitter? Probably. So what’s the workflow? Everyone’s level of work and seriousness is different so I had to figure out what mine would actually be.

This part for the photographers. Retouched images gets saved as high resolution TIFF’s in a folder called Portfolio Images. These images are usually about 11×17 x 300dpi. i create an action to resize these images to 72dpi 11×17 and save them as PSD’s (very important) in a folder called Portfolio PSDS and then continue the action to make them web width and save for web at 80% and save them in a third folder called Portfolio JPGS. PSD’s can be resized and resaved without loosing any quality. JPG’s loose quality on every resave. I call it Jpegging a Jpeg. Eventually if you do this enough times, you will have nothing but noise.

So back to the Social Media flow. All things start with your website. That’s the place that you want all the traffic to end up. I put my new work up here first.

1. WEBSITE.
After my web updates are done, i need not worry about posting the link to Facebook or Twitter. I use Feedburner to create my RSS feed and with the RSS application in Facebook and Hootsuite’s RSS option, both automatically post or tweet my latest web update links or blog posts. I keep my Auto Tweeting to a minimum, but you would be suprised how much it helps when there is so much social media to update after posting a single photo story.

2. FACEBOOK GALLERIES.
After i’ve posted to my website it’s time to put selected images into my Facebook galleries. I update work to my Fan Page and my personal page. Not everything, just some goodies. I also post mobile images shot with my iphone 4, to Facebook for iPhone. These show up in Mobile uploads of course and on my wall.

3. TWITTER
A few hours after my auto tweets leave the feed, i will sometimes post a twitpic to my twitter feed from the story and post the link and ask people to check it out if they’ve missed the earlier post. We often forget about time zones and that social media is global and always on. Give some love to your fans in Australia.

4. FLICKR
Much like Facebook, i select images to post to my Flickr account, I have quite a few followers on Flickr and for us photographers it’s an important update. I also use it as a place to post images i shoot with my iPhone 4. There are all kinds of photo sharing sites, SmugMug, Picassa and more, find one you like and stick with it. I find it hard to maintain more than one.

5. BLOGS. I submit certain sets of images or stories to a list of my favourite blogs, usually they get re-posted and drive traffic back to my website.

Most importantly, send personal emails to those that enjoy your work and would appreciate your updates. remind them that they can subscribe to your RSS feed and receive your updates via email or RSS reader.

Social Media plays a big part in the role of a photographer trying to push their work to the masses. It takes discipline to stick to a social media workflow for every single thing you update. If you are looking for eyes and new fans, every little bit helps!

Here is a list of my sociables. Please subscribe where you can.

RSS feed
Twitter
Facebook Fan Page
Flickr
YouTube
Linkedin
Digg
Stumbleupon
Delicious

and please follow our Hermann & Audrey Blog. It’s a family affair.

(If you have taken the time to read this article, take another moment to share it your favourite way. It’s always appreciated.)