BUSINESS CORNER
By David Lloyd
Social media platforms such as
Facebook and Instagram are now
regarded as an essential means
to marketing your business. David
Lloyd says there are certain practices
and disciplines to follow – and avoid
– if you are to reach your biggest
possible audience.
It seems to be a perpetually
unsolvable mystery these days, how
to show your pictures to the wider
public, ideally with minimal effort
and minimal cost. Of all the social
media platforms it is Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter which seem
to be the big three that people
use to tell the world about their
photography.
The mystery is that there seems
to be no consensus about how it
all works, what works and what
doesn’t, and what should work for
you. There are many opinions, many
of them contradicting.
In 2007, Facebook launched
Facebook Pages to allow users
to interact with businesses and
organisations in the same way they
interact with Facebook profiles. By
the end of that year, Facebook had
100,000 business pages; it now has
over 50 million. It is these Facebook
pages that made it suddenly very
accessible for photographers to
market their work to Facebook’s
user base, which stood at more than
1.5 billion.
It goes without saying that that
represents a huge audience, far
greater than any other media
outlet, printed or otherwise.
Anyone with a Facebook page can
publish posts directed at any area
of interest within that audience.
So for photographers wishing to
publicise their work, the platform is
almost ideal. It’s become very image
friendly these days, and that suits us
all very well. So with that all said,
how do you go about it all?
POST SHARES
The key to it all is post shares. You
really want to have your posts shared
by viewers as much as possible. A
shared post gets you more views,
of which the by-product is more
comments, likes and followers. But
to get your posts shared you need
to provide a good reason for people
to share and that comes down to
content, or more precisely, content
that people like to see. And variable
content is where it’s all at.
Two to three good posts a week
is always going to be better than
five or six so-so ones as that keeps
people interested enough while
minimising the risk of people getting
bored with it all and turning away.
Boredom arises when you post a bit
too often or post the same kind of
thing week in week out, so you will
need to mix it up a bit. Mixing the
regular posts with a few variants on
your usual theme will keep it lively.
14 SL-YOU | Business, People & Lifestyle
Simply posting an Instagram picture
on it once day for weeks on end is
one example of what not to do.
It’s a bit lazy, and your results will
vindicate that for sure.
Your posts are going to be seen by
more people if you post regularly
too. If you are inconsistent then very,
few of your followers are ever going
to see you. Dropping posts for a
week or two means your percentage
reach falls and you will have a hill
to climb to get your reach back to
where it was before you lapsed. If
you are regular, then more will see
your posts. And the followers that
are liking and commenting on your
posts on a regular basis are the ones
who are seeing your posts the most,
too.
ADVERTISING
Nobody goes online anywhere to see
advertising, especially on Facebook.
I’m not speaking of Facebook’s paid
promotions here, but more of posts
that contain words like Book Now,
Buy Now, or For Sale. If you’re going
to publish posts like this, you are
going to have to be pretty judicious
and conservative about it. Putting
such posts among your regular posts
will help appease your followers.
But if you are going to frequently
publish posts with words like Book
Now, or For Sale, then you are going
to either lose your followers or just
acquire them a lot more slowly.
Know, too, that people will follow
www.slyoumag.com | July-August 2019