Social media can be a powerful marketing tool, to the point that it has become the norm to market yourself online. Aside from that being the definition of an influencer, there are also people marketing their passion, trying to make it into a job, and even people using social media as a portfolio for jobs.
The latter two options are particularly attractive to photographers, whose visual means of creating art lends itself well to spreading online.
But how do they do it? And how do they stand out from the rest? We’re taking a look at how photographers use social media to gain recognition.
Teaching
If you go looking up quality content, you will soon be met with the idea that users are looking for three things: to be entertained, to learn something new or for a narrative.
Photography lends itself well to all three of these. As the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words, so a narrative is going to naturally evolve from your work, no matter how obscure or abstract. This will also take care of the entertaining aspect, although if you can add some laughter while making your photography-focused content, do.
But what about learning something? Well, it’s easier than you’d think. Photography is famously self-taught mostly, but there’s nothing wrong with gaining tips from your content. You can show methods for creating an atmosphere, poses, effects, photoshop, and loads more. And that’s just solely photography. You can offer tips on set design, directing and fashion picks as well.
Displaying
Social media allows for a great opportunity to display a portfolio. If you keep your social media accounts updated with your work regularly, you will soon have a collection of pieces that your followers can enjoy. With people able to see your work you will be able to cultivate a following and you will catch the eye of more clients.
You can also make a Facebook photobook. Link up your social media and choose all the photos you want printed into your photobook and then you will have a physical portfolio that you can present to peers and clients.
Collaborating
There are lots of opportunities to collaborate in photography, and social media has been instrumental in encouraging and facilitating it.
Photography may start out as a solo hobby, but depending on the style you go for, you might need some outside input. Maybe you’ll need a model, maybe you want some more stylish threads to picture, or maybe you want the full shebang: a set, model, effects and more.
Social media has made it a lot easier to not only find these people, who will equally be looking for work but to get in touch with these people. You can have a chat online so that you can try and make things less awkward when you meet in person, and you can do all your negotiating on the app.
Plus, Instagram’s latest update has made it easier to credit your collaborators. You can now tag them, as you did before, but add their role to the tag. Users will be able to click the tags and see who did what.
