Last Updated on 08/15/2017 by Chris Gampat
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram – Social Media. Although many of us photographers wish these things were not as important to our businesses as they are, the fact is they are. So with that knowledge, we all have the intense desire to do well on each of the social platforms we take part in. Be that friends on Facebook, or followers on Instagram and Twitter.
Instagram is probably the most significant social network for photographers right now, largely due to its very basis on images and visual storytelling. But Instagram is a tricky beast because, with a few exceptions, it is a platform that must be interacted with yourself and on mobile – no auto scheduling a month’s worth of posts at a time, you have to log in and post manually each time (or risk getting banned since we all know there are ways around this). This can make it difficult to manage for busy creatives like ourselves, and even if we can manage to post often, will anyone even see them?Eric Kim, a very well-known photographer and educator whom we have featured on many occasions recently put together this great video about social media, and getting more followers on Instagram. The video itself is rather tongue in cheek, but as he mentions, many of suggestions are real strategies that can and do work – the question is if you really want to go one of these routes.
As Kim puts it in the video, any of the strategies he mentions can be used for ‘good or evil’, which is a way of saying, these can be used to legitimately build up a following as a great photographer, or they could be used to be annoying and spam the crap out of people. It is very much a case of not what you are doing, but how you are doing it.
What mix of these strategies will work best for you and your personality? How will you decide on that mix? We recommend trying some different things and seeing what works for you. But in order to know how well you are going, you need to know your goal. Are you looking for more potentially paying clients or just more eyeballs to see your work? These are two totally different agendas and the mix of strategies used to get followers for each of those goals will be different. So if you have not already – decide what you want out of your social media, only then can you decide the best course of action to get followers that fit your agenda.
You can find more great videos from Eric Kim over on his Youtube Channel as well as his website.