Using Social Media to Grow Your Business

Use Social Media to Grow Your Business, says Carrie Wildes wedding photographer + social media diva. Carrie demonstrated how she uses social media as a marketing tool attract clients and market herself:
- she blogs about the events and people she photographs to generate buzz
- she posts "thank you" emails she receives from clients and vendors
- she pays attention to keywords (keywords depend on your business, of cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifurse)
- she created a Google business profile (it's free)
- experiment with all social media platforms: Word Press, Twitter, Facebook, Squarespace, etc.
- she uses a blogsite as her website
- she uses hyperlinks and tags to rank her SEO
- she also uses her blogsite as her working photography archive- keywording makes even more sense now :)
- she creates photo galleries on Facebook, tags the subjects in the photo and through a link she redirects those interested to read more about the event and the subjects on her website!

But she agrees, using social media as a marketing tool takes a lot of time. It is well worth it for her and she schedules blogging and Facebooking into her work.
If you plan to follow her path, you should learn to manage your workflow and your time. She religiously blogs and monitors her Google ranking- you should do the same because it is fun and FREE!

I also suggest you follow other photographers to learn how they use social media for branding and creating a buzz!

Thank you Carrie Wildes for sharing the information and spreading your love for photography at the Menaul Gallery. I am looking forward to attending your next workshop on social media on June 6th at the Menaul Gallery in Clearwater! Special thanks to Jerri and Scott Menaul for hosting these workshops.

Social Media – How do I use SM? Part 4

How do I use SM?
I have worked with the Web Developers Network at USF to develop my website (the website is a work in progress). Thanks Luqmaan Dawoodje for your hard work!!!!! My focus was to create a website that looks different than the other ones, to showcase my work for employment purposes. After looking at competitive websites, I ended up using a user friendly layout because of the simple navigation and functionality. The content is easy to update in PageLime.
Bottom line, messages have to be relevant and consistent to engage and keep the audience for a long time. It means a lot to me that because of one tweet I had 20 views for my last photo album posted on Flickr in less than two minutes!

How do you measure success in social media?
I measure success in the number of followers and in the business I generate. I use Google Analytics and Klout to measure the effectiveness of my communication and the users’ influence.
I started using social media more than a year ago as a curious media student. I now have 236 followers on Twitter and 440 friends on Facebook. I did not intend to recruit an audience, I just wanted to learn to use social media. However, I realize that numbers don’t mean much, and success in social media is a long-term endeavor. In my case, using web analytics and monetizing my website are secondary because my goal is to showcase my work.