Social media strategies

I see a few trends among photographers recently. The first is the use of Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter. In the last six months there has been an explosion of photographers joining and networking on the internet.

The old fashion way of networking has given way to the internet. I'm not sure how effective it is as far as converting it to actual paid work, but if you are a professional photographer, it is has become important.

I was posting tweets on Twitter about photography and was contacted by a photographer marketing coach Tyler Garns. His interview with me is at http://www.thinkbigart.com/blog/interview-with-a-sports-photographer/. Our conversation is about how social media is being used by photographers to market themselves.

The other big buzz word among photographers with a website is SEO, or search engine optimization. The goal is to be the first photographer on that Google page for that specific search term. Editors and photo buyers are increasingly relying on google to find photos and photographers. Google doesn't release details about how they rank searches, so most SEO is really voodoo. The usually recipe for higher search ranks are inbound links, fresh material and meta data that the so called Google bots can search and index.

The result of all this has been the boom of photographers blogs and websites with code that churn out search terms that hopefully will raise the rank of the page. Photographers who don't pay attention to SEO or social media risk missing key marketing opportunities.