Essays

Instagram Stories Are So Much Better Than Posts

Chris Gampat
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01/16/2018
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Last Updated on 01/16/2018 by Chris Gampat

There’s absolutely no secret to this: Instagram posts are at an all time low when it comes to interactivity with your own following. Photographers have been feeling the burn for awhile because it can make clients harder to find and to market to. But what photographers haven’t necessarily known is that Instagram stories is the big thing that helps counter that problem. How?Well, Instagram is becoming more and more of a platform that is putting emphasis on stories sort of like Snapchat. To that end, people tend to spend more time there than going through their actual feeds. Indeed, Instagram will probably show you something from weeks ago anyway. If you consider this, then it becomes even tougher for photographers to market themselves. The reason for this is because photographers have traditionally used their Instagram sort of as a curated dumping ground. So here’s what you’re supposed to do:

  • Keep your website
  • Keep your website’s blog
  • Keep your Instagram
  • Treat your Instagram in a different way
  • Treat your Facebook page in more or less the same way that you treat your Instagram

This idea is sort of a pyramid. So let’s go through it.

I want you to imagine the peak of a pyramid and that’s you. You are the person that is distributing content to everyone else. You’re creating images. But you have to get them out there to people. So to get them out there you first and foremost create a website portfolio of your own photography. These portfolios can be split up depending on the genre(s) that you cover. But in order for your website to stay relevant, it needs a blog. Why? Well, it’s one of the easiest and best ways to hack Google’s SEO and keywords. If someone is looking for a Charleston Based Portrait Photographer, you can go about buying adwords but that gets expensive over time. So instead you can create more and more content that Google needs to look at. Then you organically start to take over those search terms if you create the keyword rich content that always leads back to your website and blog.

Now, that’s sort of a given. One of the ultimate goals as a photographer when using Instagram is to get people to your website and book clients. You used to be able to do this with hashtags and putting out curated content. But now Instagram is killing reach. So in the same way that you try to feed your website with blog posts accordingly, you need to feed your Instagram portfolio. How do you do that? Think of Instagram stories and live feeds as your equivalent. BTS images and extra photos from your shoots can go there. When you go through your photos you should create three different subsets:

  • The images that will go into your actual portfolio: the smallest amount of them
  • The images from the shoot that will go on Instagram: This should be a larger selection but more curated
  • The images that will go into your blog posts and Instagram stories: The images will be used to tease all of the others.

No one image should be part of either batch. The creme de la creme should be on your website. The pretty good stuff should go on Instagram. The teaser content should be fed out into the social spheres like fleeting content. And that fleeting content is the start of bringing people into your web. Does this sound crazy? Oh lord yes, but at the moment of publishing this post there doesn’t really seem to be a better way.

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.