Social Media (Why You Need to Make it a Priority)
Hey friends. Long time no talk! It’s been a minute now since I’ve written a post that’s NOT exclusively for our community. Haven’t checked out the Weekend Club yet? Do yourself a favor and click here now to join us. But seriously, I hope that you and your families are all staying safe. This year has been quite the shitshow but I’m personally grateful to still get to see another day. I saw a post on Instagram recently saying something along the lines of “I thought 2020 was going to be the year I get everything I want. Now I know 2020 is the year I appreciate everything I have.” Truer words have never been spoken. You feel?
Anyway, I’d love to talk a little bit about something we’re all very familiar with especially during this time that we’re all staying at home and on our phones now more than ever. Yes, I’m talking about social media. I won’t bore you with all the same stuff that we hear often because I think by now we all know the role that social media has in our creative businesses. However, I do want to get into this topic because I think it’s important to understand WHY you need to make social media a PRIORITY as well as some of the tools and resources that have helped us grow Weekend Creative.
making social media a priority
Now you’re probably thinking… Well I know social media is important but it’s so hard to keep up with it. Wh0 Ev3n hAs tHe tiM3?!?! Or maybe you’re the type of person that wants to get all your ducks in a row before you start sharing anything to the world. YOU GUYS! I don’t want to hear any of these excuses in 2020 or really ever. You all know how crucial it is to have a social media presence especially in the photography industry so why are you not making time for the thing that will LITERALLY bring the work and clients to YOU. Just like anything in life. If it’s important to you, you’ll make the time and effort.
I want all of you to think the same about social media for your business. If you’re having a difficult time keeping up with it, change your mindset. Most of us probably think of social media as a drag but really it’s time to start thinking about it in terms of potential income. Now I’m not saying that you’ll get it right every time. Both Elle and I still forget to push through our posts every once in a while or sometimes we get distracted by other work. For example, this post I’m writing now was actually supposed to go live yesterday but our team had a pretty lax Friday that included recreating the cheese puff scene from The Office so I guess you could say we were pretty distracted, haha! It happens. But we ALWAYS make the effort and get it done one way or another.
The thing about social media is that consistency is key. Aside from the content itself, which we’ll talk about in a second, it’s important to hold yourself accountable. So what’s going to get you motivated to get it done? Figuring out your content themes, creating a schedule, and doing everything in your power to stick to it. Elle and I have a spreadsheet of our social media schedule and we try to have at least two weeks planned out in advance.
Every Monday we block out an an hour or so to plan our content and truthfully it’s not our favorite thing in the world but we do it because we know the value it will bring to our business. Not only will it grow our audience but it will help us attract the clients we want by putting ourselves and our work right in front of them. Also, it’s kind of a really great way to benchmark your progress as a creative. Sometimes I like to scroll through our feed just to see how far we’ve come.
Something that has really helped us become more efficient with social media planning is figuring out what type of content we would like to share. We all know what a time suck planning and scheduling social media can be. I mean, that’s why there are jobs out there specifically for social media management ALONE. It is a lot of freaking work and a full-time job in and of itself but don’t let that discourage you. This is where having content themes or buckets can be especially helpful.
What do I mean by this? Well, your content should be consistent but varied. Depending on the type of business you’re running, you’ll want to consider the type of content that you want to be sharing with your audience. Your work should absolutely be one of your main themes. How else are clients supposed to know what you’re capable of? Another theme could be sharing portraits of yourself so that people can get to know the person behind the account. Or maybe you love to share a lot of behind-the-scenes! Are you catching my drift yet?
Basically, having a decent amount of content themes will effectively reduce the amount of time you’ll spend trying to think of what to share. Therefore, making planning and scheduling a breeze.
how often should you post and engage?
That question can only be answered by you and the capacity at which you can create content and share it. Maybe you want to post once a day or maybe you only have the time to be able to share three times a week. Whatever the case may be, make sure you stick to it. Posting twice a week consistently is almost always better than posting every day for a couple weeks but then suddenly ghosting your audience for a month. You know?
If you switch up your social media game, your audience will know and suddenly they may not be as invested. Besides, once you fall off on posting your content, it will be that much harder to get back on that train. Knowing what your schedule is will really help your content planning feel a lot more manageable.
Another very important thing to understand about social media is that it’s a two-way street. You get what you put into it. There is so much to be said about creating a community online with intention. Engaging with your followers in a genuine manner while simultaneously targeting clients is one of the best ways to grow your audience AND get yourself in front of the people you want to be working with. It is 100% proven. Take us for example. Clearly, we weren’t doing so hot for the first two years of our business.
Our social media growth was organic but slow. Even though we knew the importance of engagement, it was hard for Elle and I to dedicate more time to it because we were also focusing a lot of our efforts on the educational aspect of our business like writing blogs, sharing resources, etc. So, what did we do? We found a solution and hired someone to help us. This brings us to our next topic, yay!
knowing when to outsource
Outsourcing can be one of the best solutions for when A) you don’t have the time to do something and would like to focus on more important aspects of your business or B) it takes you way too long because it’s not your strong suit. Or maybe it’s because you just simply don’t like doing it. And that is OKAY! Not everyone is perfect at every single aspect of their business. If you are, please come find me and share all your secrets, haha! But seriously, don’t beat yourself up if you realize that social media is just not your thing. That’s why there are people like our dear friend (and third member of Weekend Creative), Kirsten of Alway Services, who dedicate their entire business to helping support other freelancers. There’s no shame in outsourcing parts of your business that can be done so much more efficiently by others. But seriously, this is a big plug for all of the Virtual Assistants out there, including our friend Niav of nko creative, that provide these types of business support services. If you’re in that place where you can afford it and would like to have someone help you out, I highly recommend it.
what platforms should you be on?
There are a few things to consider when thinking about the types of platforms you’d like to be on. It honestly comes down to what kind of audience you would like to have, the types of clients you would like to attract, and the medium in which you are in. For example, when Elle and I first got started, we had Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Even though the majority of our content is very visual, we thought that we needed to have a Twitter account because other businesses had one too. Well, we were wrong. It became very apparent how much we didn’t care about Twitter because 1) we didn’t like writing, 2) no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t be witty 24/7 (lol) and 3) our audience and clients were not going to find us through this account. It was honestly the biggest relief to remove Twitter from our social media planning because it was one less platform we had to deal with and it also allowed us to pour into the other visual platforms that we were on. Be on platforms that make SENSE for your business.
For us, as product photographers, a big part of how we share our work with the world and our clients is through social media. Instagram and Facebook are a no brainer. Facebook establishes your business and helps people find you. Instagram is essentially your digital portfolio for clients to see and how you connect and communicate with your audience visually. One of the platforms that has been really great for us lately in growing our audience and attracting clients is Pinterest. Most people think of this platform as an inspiration or mood board but it’s a search engine in its truest form. If you’re a photographer, you NEED to be utilizing this network to put your work up so it can be seen by a new audience and drive traffic to your site. We’re actually working on a Pinterest course at the moment so you may want to keep your eyes peeled for that.
Another platform that we are happy to be on is Behance. It’s owned by Adobe and of course we had to join it ever since we started hosting for the Adobe Live team back in June of last year. While we don’t update it as frequently, it’s still an awesome platform for visual creatives to share their work with their peers and the general public. One aspect that I like about it is that you actually have a chance to peek into the process of other creatives. The way you share your work is by posting a “project” and you’re free to show anything and everything including behind-the-scenes, sketches, reiterations, and more.
our favorite social media tools + apps
Alright, now for our favorite section because you know we love a good tool that helps us work more efficiently. Am I right or am I right? Haha! Well, I think we all know how great a social media scheduler can be. Our personal favorite? Hootsuite. Duh! Even though we get mad at it sometimes for crashing on us, it’s still the best in the game because you can connect so many different types of platforms. We love to use it for our many Instagram accounts (because we have more than one… hi Little Sunday Studio and Per Our Last Email) and our Facebook pages. I’ll come right out and say it. It’s not the cutest platform but it gets the job done and we like it for that reason. It’s also really great because it’s free if you only have a couple of platforms to worry about but once you start adding more accounts, you may find yourself upgrading in the near future.
We love to use our Google Sheets for planning our social media schedule. You don’t have to do this but it’s worked for us because it makes it easy to see what content is going out that day. It’s also really nice to be able to refer to it on a bigger screen as we schedule our posts in Hootsuite. Below is a quick screenshot of what our schedule looked like a couple of months ago. I know it looks crazy but it’s really not that awful and we like to color code it or make marks to it so that we know who is supposed to be writing and scheduling the post, if the blog is going on our community or not, and so forth.
On top of using Google Sheets, I also want to share that we use Google Drive to store all of our work in web sizes so that we can easily access them from their app in our phones. There’s nothing like seamless scheduling when you have everything you need right in your phone, haha! A few other noteworthy tools that I’d like to share are Unfold, A Design Kit, ColorStory, VSCO, Filmm, and PS Express. All of these are great photo editing and graphic making tools that are pretty awesome. We love using Unfold and A Design Kit for random little graphics that could go on our IG stories and the rest of them we love to use for quick and easy edits, crop, and so forth. I suggest checking them all out to see which of them you’ll enjoy!
For us, it’s super important to be able to see visually what our Instagram feed will look like and for that reason we like to use Snug. It’s a pretty neat app that allows you to see several of your most recently published posts on Instagram so that you can build out what your feed will look like with posts that will be published in the future. We actually have a love hate relationship with this app because it’s always randomly crashing or it sometimes doesn’t work for Elle but every time we try to find something to replace it, nothing ever comes as close to it. The reason being is that both of us can be signed into the app and if one of us makes changes to it, the edits usually show up immediately on both of our ends. We literally have not been able to find another app that does this. Trust me. We’ve scoured the internet already. On top of that, it allows you to edit photos within the platform so you can see how a certain crop will look in the square. You guys, I hope I’m making sense here. It’s 1am and I’m starting to hallucinate. Just kidding! But if you’re still with me here, I appreciate you.
*a screenshot of Snug*
Ok, for our last digital tool that I want to talk about is Tailwind. I mean, really, we could probably write a whole post on it because it’s been very successful for us but like I said earlier, we’re working on a Pinterest course so stay tuned for that. What I will mention is that it’s a great Pinterest tool that lets you schedule your pinterests so that you can keep that platform running all the time. Yes, even while you sleep. It’s pretty awesome and I think using Tailwind has been the biggest contributor to our success on that platform. We’re still getting to know it but it’s truly been a huge traffic driver.
You guys! Thanks for bearing with me on this post. It was a bit of a long one but clearly it’s something that we're pretty passionate about and we just wanted to share the importance of why you need to make social media a priority in your creative business. We hope you found some of our tips helpful and that you’ll check out the tools that we shared. If you have any social media tricks or tools that you’d like to share with us, feel free to comment below! Thanks again for taking the time to read this. Until next time!
Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela