Social Media Marketing for Photographers // Photography + Community

This Saturday (July 18th) marks the second annual Worldwide Photo Walk, with photowalks taking place in hundreds of cities around the globe. While there are contests and prizes associated with the photowalk, the real value can be in the networking and interaction with other photographers from a variety of backgrounds in your area. Most of the photowalks last a couple hours and are followed by a meal or happy hour opportunity to chat about photography.

Find a photowalk near you and join in the fun.

Photo by t4m, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
events,
networking,
photowalking,
worldwide photo walk

In the last few days, there has been some discussion among some of my local area Twitter users (near Portland, Oregon) about a list that ranks the “Top 100 Twitter Users” in our area. There has been some debate about the criteria used or the accuracy of the list, but I have to wonder: does it matter?

There are various Twitter directories that rank users based on a niche… WeFollow is one of the more popular ones. You can see the WeFollow list of popular Twitter users that indicate photography as an interest. These lists can be interesting if one wants to find well-known or prominent Twitter users in a given niche, but there’s not a lot of sense in obsessing over boosting one’s rank on such a list.

As a photographer, I use Twitter to make new connections with folks who are discussing photography or a photography need, as well as to maintain relationships with clients and other acquaintances who could be potential clients. I’ll talk about photo-related activities as part of my daily life. I’ve made new clients for headshot and event work direction from interactions on Twitter. Look more at your end results than a ranking number. Are you forming new personal and professional relationships? Are you spreading the word about your photography work?

Isn’t that more important than a ranking?

Tagged as:
networking,
popularity,
Twitter

Social media can be all about networking and building relationships with others in your field. Through blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and other online resources I have “met” and developed relationships with dozens if not hundreds of photographers and other professionals. One of the best ways to build these relationships over time is also one of the easiest: leave comments on blogs.

Let’s quickly talk about the mechanics of leaving a comment. Leave your name, your email address, and (assuming you have a website), your website or blog’s URL. When it asks for your name, leave your actual name. Your name is not “Boston Wedding Photographer” or “Cheap Event Photography” or “Seattle Senior Pictures.” Some less-than-helpful SEO guys will try to convince you otherwise, but at this stage in the evolution of the web, trying to stuff keywords into blog comments is just spammy.

A good blog comment will (hopefully) provide value to both the person leaving the comment as well as the blog on which the comment is left. If you’re the one leaving the comment, you’re injecting yourself onto the radar of the blogger. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my posts, I make sure to read it thoroughly and (if the commenter left a URL) check out the person’s website. If their website is interesting, I’m going to bookmark it or subscribe to the RSS feed. In short: if you leave a comment on one of my blogs, there’s a good chance I’m going to become a regular reader of your blog.

Over time, as one leaves comments multiple times on the same blog, you’ll start to be a known quantity to the blogger. Bloggers remember the people that leave meaningful comments on their blogs. Blog comments are a great way to do some virtual networking and build up relationships with peers, vendors, and other voices.

Do you leave blog comments as often as you’d like?

Photo by Barsch28, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
blogging,
comments,
Conversation,
influence,
networking,
relationships