Facebook marketing for photographers – Part 1 of 3

Over the past few years, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have become incredibly popular. Virtually everybody it seems, especially younger people, have a profile on at least one of these sites. Not only are social networking sites great ways to stay in touch with friends, but they also offer fantastic marketing opportunities.

Firstly, I hardly know anybody who isn’t on Facebook. Officially, Facebook currently has 400 million active users but that number will be increasing every day. For a photographer, Facebook offers an unparralled opportunity to showcase your work to a huge audience.

My Facebook page, www.facebook.com/neilredfernphotography, now has over 1,000 fans and has started generating work for me but getting to this stage has taken a lot of time and effort. In this post, and a further two posts which I will add in the next few days, I will explain how I achieved this, and more importantly, how to make your Facebook page generate work for you.

So, how do you start to tap in to Facebook’s huge potential and start generating work?

Well, the answer lies in firstly creating either a Facebook Page or Facebook Group for your business. Deciding whether you go for a page or a group is a topic of some debate and both have their advantages and disadvantages over the other. A simple search of “Facebook page or group” on Google will return countless returns on the subject. In my experience though, having used both for my photography business, I have found Pages to work far better.

Setting up a Facebook page for your business is easy and can be done in minutes – click this link to set up a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/pages

So, once your page is set up, how do you start promoting it to your clients, and more importantly, your potential clients?

Firstly, before you invite people to join your page you will need to make the page look attractive and worth joining when people do visit. For a wedding photography page this obviously means adding some of your favourite wedding photographs to your page. As well as adding photographs remember to add links to your website and/or blog. A key element in making your page look attractive, and an element which is often overlooked, is to make the profile picture on your page look the best it can. To do this I would always suggest utilising the maximum profile image size allowed by Facebook, which is 200 x 600 px. Have a look at my page for an example: www.facebook.com/neilredfernphotography

Also, before uploading images to your page – optimise them for Facebook! This means resizing images to a maximum of 604 px x 604 px. Once images are resized, open the image in Photoshop and sharpen them. Also save the image as SRGB. I would also watermark the image with your logo or website address – I will explain why later. Once you have resized and sharpened your images correctly they will look infinitely better on Facebook.

So, once your page is set up, has lots of nice photographs and looks interesting you will want to start encouraging people to become a fan of your page. To get the ball rolling I would advise firstly inviting all your existing Facebook friends to join your page. To do this, go to your page and select ‘Suggest to friends’ from the left hand side. Select all the friends you would like to invite and click ‘send invitations’. When your Facebook friends accept your invitation (which hopefully they will!) they will show up as ‘Fans’ of your page. (I should point out that I really don’t like the term ‘fans’ as it sounds very egotistical so I always refer to people who have joined my page as ‘members’! However for the purpose of this article however I will use the terms ‘fans’…)

When one of the friends you have invited becomes a fan of your page, this will show up in their Facebook news feed. Even better though, it will also show up in their friends news feeds. This is where the viral marketing nature of Facebook really starts to kick in! When their friends read that “Joe Bloggs has become a fan of Your Business” they in turn may click on the link to your business page and, if the page looks interesting (which it should do by this point!) with lots of comments and interactions, they will hopefully also join. This is turn will show up in their feed, and so the cycle continues – viral marketing!

Once you have invited all your existing Facebook friends, and the page has some fans, I would advise inviting your past clients and existing clients. For a wedding photographer this would consist of couples whose wedding you have previously photographed and those whose weddings you will be covering in the future.

But what if they are not already your friends on Facebook? How do you invite them? Well, there are two ways. Firstly you can send them an email with a link to your group. Chances are, as they already know you, they will happily join your page. Alternatively you can contact them directly through Facebook. To do this, paste their email address in the search box on Facebook and, if they have a Facebook account, their profile will appear. From here you can usually select ‘send a message’ (although this depends on their privacy settings) again, you can use this function to send them a link to your new page and invite them to become a fan. Now, unless I feel as though I know the person well, I personally wouldn’t choose to contact clients direct through Facebook as I think it can appear quite intrusive, but the option is there.

Hopefully, once you have invited your friends and clients and picked up a few extra fans through the viral nature of Facebook I mentioned earlier, it won’t be too long until you have 100 fans. Getting to the 100 fans is an important milestone for a Facebook page as it allows you to select a vanity url for your page. So, instead of your Facebook page having an ugly address with numerous characters and numbers you will be able to register a nice, neat, memorable name such as www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname So, once you have 100 fans, head over to http://www.facebook.com/username/ to register your vanity url.

If you are serious and committed about developing your photography fan page, registering your vanity url is essential as it will allow you to use your Facebook page link across all your promotional literature, such as business cards, booking forms, brochures and letters etc. Obviously you should also include permanent links to your Facebook page on your website, blog and email signature. In fact the more places you can advertise your link online the better!!

I think that’s enough for now, but please look out for part two of my ‘Facebook marketing for photographers’ which I will add soon

Neil

Manchester Wedding Photographer
www.neilredfern.com