Is FaceBook dead for Photographers? - Build your Website

ditpaintball

By now, a lot of photographers who use facebook have either a "Page" for their photos or have had their personal "Profile" converted to a page. All inline with facebooks new monetisation scheme and business policies.

It is a common story, but in the last year, my reach and the amount of people seeing posts has plummeted. I have a modest 5,700K ( shameless plug: www.facebook.com/richiephoto ) likes on my page and sometimes when I post a photo, 24hours later only 9 people have seen it. I spent a lot of time over the years building up my facbook following, making sure people tagged and linked back etc. But it is pretty much all for nothing now unless you pay facebook to promote your work.

I have since then concentrated more on my instagram now and that sees a healthier interaction rate and better growth rates. ( shameless plug 2 : www.instagram.com/richiebuttle )

I done the flickr thing years ago and got fed up of it. Never got onto pix or any of them other ones... nothing photography aim. I have generally stuck to the social media platforms ( FB / Twitter / Insta).

I have always have my own website ( shameless plug 3 www.richie.ie ) but never updated that often as it was just easier and quicker to use social media. For example I would release all the pics of a shoot on FB and then update the website. However my new plan from now on will be up aggressively update my website first from now on, make that the primary source of material and then update the social media platforms in a drip feed manor.


What are your thoughts on it... are you fed up with Facebooks new policies ( and the nipple police there). What are you doing to get your work out there?

afatbollix

You should be using Social media to push people to your website.

That way you can sell them more things or get more bookings.

If you don't push them to your website all they will do is like your photo and move on. In other words you have not made anything off that person so business lost.

jimmii

Reach certainly has taken a massive hammering in the last year. At first I was like 5700k is modest woah but then realised its 5.7k your reach should still definitely be way more than 9 after 24 hours though thats very weird. The boost function certainly does make your reach jump through the roof but you're obviously paying for that from our experience with it though you do tend to see a better response to further posts after that for a while too. As mentioned above social media should be used to push people to your site that should be the main KPI you look to measure if the post got 9 people to your site then that isn't terrible its hard to get people to move from one site to another.

ditpaintball

afatbollix wrote: »

You should be using Social media to push people to your website.

That way you can sell them more things or get more bookings.

If you don't push them to your website all they will do is like your photo and move on. In other words you have not made anything off that person so business lost.

yes, but that is the problem now. It is no good if people don't see the post on social media in the first place.

ps3man

I gave up on it nearly two years ago, I had 1500 people at its peak. Anything I posted had a good reach of nearly half that. Now anything I post barely even 15-20 people see it. Each post would cost me 14 euro for all the active users on my page to see it. Unless people interact with your page nobody will ever see it.

almorris

It's PAYG now no matter what platform you use. Google Ad's will cost you if you want to to promote your website. The "It's free and always will be" tagline is not for a business. Some people would see that as fair enough. We're making money from using Social Media so why shouldn't we have to pay to advertise.

Personally I'm looking at being more aggressive in the use of referrals from other suppliers. ( Pay for Bookings ). I think a multi faceted approach is needed to market yourself and not reliance on one avenue for an income stream.

jonathan mark

on fb you could try some posts to gauge how many people see your posts. 9 people seems very low. say as them to post that they have seen the post. in my tests 50% 60% see my posts but it is a wind up that you end up thinking you are posting to yourself...

gloobag

Facebook was/is a depressing time sink of a popularity contest at the best of times. Some of the lies, bitching and **** slinging I've witnessed among the photography communities in particular is an absolute disgrace. Such an environment is not good for the psyche.

I pretty much gave up on all social media a while back. I only post very sporadically these days. And you know what? Nothing changed. I'm still getting work. Probably more now that I'm not wasting time, busting my ass trying to come up with some lame excuse to post something in a desperate hunt for "likes" or "follows".

A decent website with good SEO is the only way to go now. Churn out a few relevant blog posts, maybe a bit of Youtube vlogging if that's your sort of thing, and you can't go wrong really. Pretty much all my work comes from people finding me on Google, and the rest would be referrals from former clients or other contacts I've actually met in real life (remember when that used to happen).

To be honest, I'm glad this is the way it's going. No more instant web presence for Johnny and his Canon 1000D with kit lens. The bar had been set so low. No harm to raise it back up a few notches.

B.

Second Toughest in_the Freshers

jonathan mark wrote: »

on fb you could try some posts to gauge how many people see your posts. 9 people seems very low. say as them to post that they have seen the post. in my tests 50% 60% see my posts but it is a wind up that you end up thinking you are posting to yourself...

it could be that the majority of them wouldn't have seen your original post, but saw 'xxxx has replied to a post by Jonathan' which still gets your page seen by more people, but might be a bit misleading in terms of your usual posts.

The Black Oil

Didn't Facebook change its algorithm in April, or something?

I heard it put this way 'Facebook doesn't want you to control what you see because that's not good for their bottom line.'

mystic86

gloobag wrote: »

No more instant web presence for Johnny and his Canon 1000D with kit lens. The bar had been set so low. No harm to raise it back up a few notches.

B.

Talk about elitist.

sheesh

set up your website to push posts to your social media ie post it on your website your website automatically posts it to facebook and where ever else this stuff also links back to your website


that way you save yourself the time spent putting it on all of them. more importantly you are using social media to raise the profile of your property the webpage.

Also have a look at using youtube it is supposed to be the second biggest search engine in the world.

ditpaintball

Back in June I experimented with it, I put up THIS POST offering €50 vouchers for shoots etc. That one only reached 644 people.

644 out of 5.7K ish

gloobag

ditpaintball wrote: »

Back in June I experimented with it, I put up THIS POST offering €50 vouchers for shoots etc. That one only reached 644 people.

644 out of 5.7K ish
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I'm fairly sure I read an article a while back (can't remember where) that talked about how Facebook can weed out these types of posts and severely throttle their reach. Facebook have offers/discounts functionality baked in to the pages (for a price I'd imagine), so there isn't a hope that they'd let this type of stuff slide for long.

I saw a lot of people try that exact same strategy, even before Facebook supposedly clamped down, and it was usually a failure. I think part of the problem is that it's a bit of a convoluted process for a discount. I know in reality it would only take a couple of minutes to carry out, but when you read that block of text it sounds exhausting. People want everything to be quick and easy these days.

ditpaintball

Ya it is against their new TOS to do stuff like that, but I said feck it and experimented with it anyway.... with dismal results.

On my other photography page for sports work, it only has 2K likes and I boosted an post for €100 and it reached 96K people.... only 556 reach was organic.

gloobag

mystic86 wrote: »

Talk about elitist.

To elaborate, I have no problem with the Canon 1000D (my missus has one), or new photographers. I get emails on an almost weekly basis from young/new photographers looking to assist, and I'll usually give most of them a shot or at the very least offer some detailed critique and advice.

What I do have a problem with is unprofessional behavior. Simply acquiring a fancy camera and setting up a page does not entitle someone to claim to be a professional photographer. Professionalism isn't about getting paid, it's about the quality of your work, how you deal with people and run your business.

Facebook pages allowed a **** load of people who had put the minimal amount of effort into the craft or their "business" to perpetrate this lie of professionalism. Now that Facebook is pay to play, most of these guys will disappear or be forced to up their game. Which can only be a good thing for the photographic community as a whole, and all the potential clients out there who have less of a chance of paying for poor work.

gloobag

ditpaintball wrote: »

Ya it is against their new TOS to do stuff like that, but I said feck it and experimented with it anyway.... with dismal results.

On my other photography page for sports work, it only has 2K likes and I boosted an post for €100 and it reached 96K people.... only 556 reach was organic.

That's an astronomical difference in reach, and goes to show just how rigged the game is really. Was there much of a return on the €100 investment?

I experimented with paid ads myself, and all it really amounted to was few new followers.

Aimead

Facebook’s methodology has two serious problems - click farms and user apathy - which causes any paid advertising to result in less reach.

In order for click farms not to stand out operators tend to click on almost anything, including ads that you yourself might have purchased. These zombie accounts never engage which cripples your reach. Facebook doesn’t send out your postings to all of your followers, instead it sends it out to a small subset. If the small subset engages a lot with a post then it will get sent out to more followers. However, if your subset contains zombie accounts that don’t engage then Facebook won’t send your post out to any more followers – hence your reach is crippled.

The second issue is user boredom. Why would a given Facebook user click ‘like’ on every one of your postings even if they are a follower of yours (or became a follower because they seen one of your ads)? I don’t mean that in any bad way, but the average person quickly gets sick and tired of clicking like on everything, which means less engagement and thus less reach.

I understand why Facebook do it this way as they make more money, but for those trying to leverage the platform it isn’t so good.

gloobag wrote: »

A decent website with good SEO is the only way to go now. Churn out a few relevant blog posts, maybe a bit of Youtube vlogging if that's your sort of thing, and you can't go wrong really.

Best advice in the thread so far, and it totally matches my own experiences. People looking for a particular service will go to Google, and by regularly adding some decent content to your website you often have your work come up in their searches. There are so many recommendations for SEO, but the best advice is to have good regular content that people would want to look at – after all, that’s what Google is tweaking their algorithm to reward.

Some CMS (eg: Wordpress) software allow you to link to your Facebook account so any blog postings you make will get added to your Facebook feeds anyway so you won’t be losing out by ditching the platform. There are plenty of good plugins for that help make galleries easier too so the usability of Facebook isn’t as big of an advantage it once was.

Addendum: When I say my experiences I don't mean photography. I've done quite a few different sites over the years and those that were used to add regular content have done very well with regard to SEO irrespective of what market the site was trying to cater to.

ditpaintball

gloobag wrote: »

That's an astronomical difference in reach, and goes to show just how rigged the game is really. Was there much of a return on the €100 investment?

I experimented with paid ads myself, and all it really amounted to was few new followers.

Yes it worked out ok, generated plenty of leads etc. But my other photography page is not for portraits or family shoots etc.

There is a science along to boosting an ad on facebook with all the targeting options you have.

Deadlie

I don't think it's dead - it's just opened up to people willing to spend a small fee (I threw even €3 at one post and got great returns - bearing in mind not every post has to be in people's faces) and are willing to be creative about getting it shared. I work on the Goldenplec social media page and one of our most successful posts was something that interested our fan base, was funny and eye catching. We didn't spend a penny on it either.

That Dani Diamond chap was complaining about how fewer 'likes' he was getting on FB as opposed to Instagram and stating it as a reason for effectively giving up his page. Which is so moronic - if you base success on 'likes' your onto a hiding. Besides, FB is the daddy of them all.

Things always change - twenty years ago photographers weren't getting business online at all - it's all about adapting to the new challenges. You ca't fault FB for wanting to make a cut of the business that's done on their platform.