Facebook for Photogs – 10 Ways to Generate Business

If you’re even remotely interested in making photography more than a hobby, you’ve probably got a Facebook fanpage. If not, get one now! To make your own, just go to a page (try mine!) and on the bottom left of the page, click ‘create a page’ like this:

Once you have this all new page for your photography business, you can start using it to generate business right away!

{Some general tips about FB pages}

Login as a page – When ‘pages’ first started, there wasn’t a way that page owners could get notifications on the activity going on over on their business page the same way they did with their personal account. Now, you can ‘login as a page’ to get notifications, ‘like’ other pages, comment on photos and walls as your page, rather than as yourself. This is excellent for business! In order to login and use FB as your business instead of as your personal account, click “account” in the top right corner and then click ‘use facebook as a page’ like this:

Nice clean URL – When you’re viewing your page, click the ‘edit page’ button in the top-right corner and then click ‘basic information’ to find the place to establish your page’s username and URL. Then, instead of a huge string of numbers, you can direct people to a nice clean URL like mine: facebook.com/ehphoto.

Badge – You can make a badge for your website that people can ‘like’ directly from your site without ever heading to Facebook. You can get this ‘badge’ via the ‘marketing’ area of your page’s settings.

{How I use my Page to generate business}

1. When you first start your page -and every couple months thereafter- post a link from your personal page over to your professional one. Just to get your friends onboard and keep the snowball rolling.
2. Share: another way to get your page some exposure is to click the little ‘share’ button on the bottom left of the page (under the ‘people who like this’ area)
3. Publish status updates from your page about an upcoming session you’re excited about or even something personal. FB is the place for your business to be a real live human –> YOU!
4. Post regularly about current promotions you’re doing, announcements, or anything that relates to your business. And do it more than once a quarter! The idea is to keep your brand in front of people’s eyes continually. So the next time they think of ‘photographer’, YOU pop up in their head right away!
5. Post casting calls. I got one of my best weddings so far just by saying “anyone know of a couple planning an off-beat, alternative wedding?” They were so off-beat that they hadn’t even been planning on a photographer until their friend forwarded my FB page to them!
6. If you publish session sneak peeks, do it from your business page and then tag the person in the photo (if you have access to them via FB). If not, you might be able to privately message a friend of that friend and ask them to tag their friend in the photo. When you do this, the sneak peek will show in all of their friends’ news feeds and -voila!- instant referral to every single one of their friends!
7. …on that note, if you offer web images to your clients (and you have a signed release), then post them as a gallery on your page! Tag them in the album (if possible) and make sure that your images are branded with your website URL to keep the traffic (and credit) coming back to you.
8. Login as your business page and then head over to the profile(s) of your recent clients and just leave them a little note to say thank you and that you enjoyed your time together. This will be nice for them and will likely also show up in their friends’ feeds, giving you more exposure. Note: Unfortunately, this will only work if they’re in your personal friends list, or if they have their profile unlocked.
9. Try an ad campaign. You can make targeted ads for people in your area in just a few clicks! You can have the ad send them to your FB page or straight to your website and you can control how much you spend so it doesn’t get out of control. You can target a specific gender, town, age group, marital status, and many other elements so your ad gets shown to exactly who you consider your target client.
10. Run a contest for something like a free session for new clients or a print credit for established ones. Have part of the entering process be to ‘share’ your page with their friends.

Facebook is quite possibly the best thing to happen to tech-savvy businesses since the computer itself! Yes, there are downsides like image theft, but when you’re looking to enhance your client base and beef up your bottom line, nothing beats instant access to billions of potential clients all in just a few clicks!