Beginners Guide To Social Media for Photography

Getting the most from Social Media for photographers is relatively easy and free

Introduction

Firstly im a total social media nightmare, lets get that straight from the get go. I have put this Beginners Guide To Social Media for Photography together to try and help similar like minded people get started in promoting there website, I’m just so new to it all even though social media has been around for a fair few years now I have never got round to using them because:

1. There are so many different types of social sites for different uses, from video’s to images, to music, to general interaction with friends or family to social news, you get the jist.
2. I have never needed to use social media

And because of those two reasons I wanted to share my initial experiences with other fellow new photographers starting out or wanting to get into Social Media sites.

I’m quite lucky in the sense that I know a little bit about websites prior to starting this little website of mine to showcase my photos and blog about photography, so I will try and aim this at beginners, which I would defiantly class myself as a beginner in the social media arena.

Why use Social Media for Photography ?

Simple really, to promote your work and get feedback so you can improve, or even sell your work.

Social media for photography is great to promote your work and get recognised.

Before starting JamesPictures.co.uk I had a personal Facebook page and another Facebook page for another project that I never even used, so I knew you could have separate Facebook pages for your separate interests.

Now to be honest do you really need a website like JamesPictures ?

No you don’t, I simply purchased a theme and installed it onto WordPress and was up and running after 24 hrs, I made a few tweaks but they were defiantly personal preference tweaks, I could have been posting blogs and pictures after 24hrs of buying the domain name and registering the IP to my host but if you just want to share your photos then you can use some if not all of the social media sites that im going to list in this article.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty of starting social media to promote yourself or your work.

Firstly if you do have your own website, and you want people to visit your website, sign up for Google Analytics’s Account and get it added to your website so you can monitor traffic statistics coming in from the social sites to see what works best for you.
I have only had mine up and running for about 6 weeks now, and I can already see that Flickr is bringing in the most link backs by far, even more than Google Search and Bing combined, so social media does have some good points going for it, promoting your site !!

My first social page to set-up was Facebook’s, as I already had a personal account it was easy to set-up a sub-page, I decided to set-up a sub-page because I felt bad for posting all my photos to my friends and guessed some of them might be getting a bit cheesed of with me posting pictures all the time.

It took all of 5 minutes to set up and I soon found out that I needed “Likes” to get going I could have sent an invite out to all my Facebook friends to “Like” my Facebook page but I opted not to, if you have no morals or this doesn’t bother you then, it would be the fastest way to get likes, once you have 30+ likes you get to see the pages statistics. One negative thing ive noticed about Facebook is that when you add images it strips all of the Meta data and also the image quality is not the same, It seems to strip the contrast and sharpness of your images so I wouldn’t use this to promote my better work, maybe best for just linking to articles from say my blog, like this or to other social media, which Ill cover next.

Which Social Media Sites

For me personally I have decided to use the following sites, and the main reasons are listed below:

• Facebook
  • Used for sharing what im up too and what I have got planned, its also quick to flick back and forth from my personal Facebook page which is a nice feature
  • Used for posting small images 1024 x 800 (select HD option when uploading + make sure image is marked with copyright logo as META data is stripped on upload)
  • Used for linking to my blog articles, website pages and linking to my Flickr Image uploads
• Twitter
  
  • Used for live updates when im out and about
  • Excellent to see what’s going on in your local area
  • Image uploads are stripped of META and are resized so I only upload images no bigger than 1024 x 800 with copyright logo on image.
  • Used for linking to my blog articles, website pages and linking to my Flickr Image uploads
• Flickr
  • I only have the “Free” account initially but I may upgrade to the “Pro” account if I start taking more pictures
  • The “Free” account comes with the ability to Upload 300mb every month, which is more than enough for my needs
  • Used for posting my most recent images at 1280 x 1024 + All META data stays in place + copyright stays in place
  • Excellent for joining fellow photographer discussions
  • Excellent for submitting your works to groups and competitions
• 500px
  • Excellent for feedback on your work (in the initial 24hrs I received over 50 comments on 40 photos I uploaded and many many “likes”
  • The “Free” plan seems rather limited with only 10 photos per week upload if your a heavy user, I may be able to manage on 10 a month to be honest
  • The “Plus” plan at $19.95 seems fair for someone with an already existing website
  • The “Awesome” plan would be ideal for someone who is looking for a full blown website, with features such as Personal Store, Personalized Portfolio, Subdomain and even Domain Mapping!! You actually wouldn’t need a website if you had the “Awesome” plan.

I know there are plenty more social sites like Pinterest, Stipple, Google+, ePhotoZine, Picasa and Tumblr to mention a few (there is a list of 50 for photographers here) but for now like I said in the introduction im new to social media and im still exploring all of there features, positives  and negatives, another thing I have noticed is that im spending more time posting on social sites than I am on my own website, surely that’s not right if you want to build a good platform to promote yourself.

Ease of Use

Using 500px to promote your Photography is very easy and rewarding

Once you have signed up to your social sites, which is the hardest part to be honest they are all very easy to use, the easiest has got to be Facebook, I found Twitter a little tricky at first because they use the “#” hash #tag #to #link #you #to #other #articles and the “@” symbol @to @talk @to @other @people but once you have the hang of those two things its straight forward.

I found flickr very easy to use, add your image add a title, description and hit upload. you can then make “sets” of images and gallery’s. 500px is very similar to Flickr except it doesn’t have “groups” but I found the search feature on 500px excellent, I can search for D7000 and it shows all the images taken by the same camera as me, I can search Tokina 11-16mm and it only shows pictures took with that lens, its very good.

Both Flickr and 500px have modern user interfaces and are easy to pick up and use.

Conclusion

Take your time to find out what works best for you and what you get up to. I like taking landscape photography and the above social media sites seem to work for me, that being said if you wanted to possibly sell your photos you might just use 500px or ePhotoZine with both those options you probably wouldn’t even need a website.

Using Flickr for social media is extremely easy

I personally really like Flickr and I will continue to monitor my Google Analytics’s to see where I get the most link backs from.

Flickr is a photography social site with a community as well, where as 500px seems to just be a photo sharing site.

Twitter is in its own league for “Gas Bagging” as I would put it, talking about yourself a lot!! whilst I think its good I don’t really think its great for showing your work, just use it to link to your website or linking to your recent Flickr image. The same goes for Facebook because they strip your META and decrease the quality of your images, just use it to promote your external “links”.

One thing I need to look into is getting them talking to each other, I know for example that my WordPress install is now going to post this article to Twitter when I publish it automatic, and I know that I can then post from Twitter to Facebook, so I will do some more investigation work to see If I can simply post something once and get it to share to several social sites, it would defiantly save me some time.

The only downside to social media is that it can be time consuming if you write long descriptions, but it is entirely up to you how much you write about an image and how many images you are going to submit, if like me you intend to maybe submit 2 a week its no hardship.

This article is my own personal view of Social Media and photography, its defiantly not gospel but I hope it helps someone because I didn’t read no manual I just spend 2 days uploading 50+ images to social sites to see what gives the initial best results.

Thanks for reading, James