In recent years, we’ve seen social media transform from simply sharing wordy statuses and tweets to becoming a platform for visually compelling and inspiring imagery and storytelling. While this means that sharing to your social channels can take a bit more work and resources, photographers have the upper hand in succeeding at social media content creation.

In this article, we’ll help you learn how you can create your own social media content while efficiently repurposing your portfolio and client work.

Why Photographers Should Regularly Create Content on Social Media

At its core, social media is an incredible marketing tool for many reasons. It’s one of the most effective free options for small or new businesses and entrepreneurs.

For photographers, your social media channels can serve as your digital portfolio, giving you more exposure to a larger audience than your website even could. Content creation for social media allows you to be discovered by potential clients and shows them exactly the type of work they can expect from you. As well, it gives you a space to interact with other photographers that you can collaborate with and learn from.

Determine the Goals of Your Social Media Content Creation

Before you begin to create content for your social media channels, you’ll want to determine the specific goals you’re trying to reach:

• Do you want to raise brand awareness?
• Are you looking for more projects?
• Are you searching for more long-term partnerships?

No matter which goal you’re trying to achieve, you’ll want to know exactly who your ideal clients and audience are to get there. Identifying your target audience will help you create the voice, tone, and feel for your social media and will help you determine which social media channels will be best for you.

Plan Your Social Content

Now that you’ve determined your ideal target audience, it’s time to be specific on your objectives for your social media content creation. Decide if your goal is to get more clients, increase brand awareness, or even collaborate on a project with another photographer. Understanding your goal will get you on the right track in what type of social content to create.

If you’re having a difficult time starting the planning stage of your content creation, look at what types of content successful photographers in your industry are already publishing. You can find inspiration in how they are formatting their social media profiles and how they are using their content to market themselves.

Create a Content Calendar

The key to strong social media content creation is to have a clear strategy for the ideas and themes you’ll be posting. You’ll want to keep track of what content you publish and when. If you have an idea for a blog post, take sections of the post and repurpose them into further content for social media and email newsletters.

Having a detailed plan and strategy will help to create a story for your brand and build trust and interest in your business.

Market Your Content

The job isn’t done once you press “publish” on your content. You’ll want to market your content across all platforms. Let’s refer back to that blog post you may have written. Share the link to the blog post in an email newsletter to your audience. Include social sharing buttons at the bottom of your blog posts, so that readers can share the content with their network.

As you repurpose that content creation for social media, use relevant hashtags to make the posts discoverable to a larger audience. Join Facebook groups that fit your industry and niche, share your valuable content there, and begin a conversation with other professionals. This is a great way to network, learn new strategies and methods, and gain inspiration from other photographers.

Analyze Your Results

Once you’ve published content to your social media channels and are trying to understand what your audience will be most interested in moving forward, take a look at your social media analytics. Each social media management platform has insights that you can check to help you further get to know your audience.

Not only can you find out the gender, age, location, and even interests of your audience, but you can see how each social media post performed. Take note of similar themes, styles, tones, and subjects within these posts and use that as inspiration to create and share new content.

Tools for Social Media Content Creation

Managing your social media can feel overwhelming at first. Figuring out how to be successful at it can be honestly intimidating at times. There are some useful and accessible content creation tools for social media that will make the process easier and more efficient:

• Social media management: Software tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Loomly allow you to do hashtag research, editorial calendar layout, and schedule your posts. As well, you can use these platforms to automate comments and responses to your audience to save you time with any FAQs.
• Graphics: Tools such as Canva, Freepik, Adobe, and VistaCreate help you to quickly layout and design graphics for your social media channels. These platforms often provide templates for the different social media post sizes and have a plethora of elements to add to each graphic.
• Where to get inspiration: Having a creative block? Start browsing Pinterest, Instagram, or YouTube. Browse through other content creators’ ideas and find inspiration for how you can create useful and valuable content of your own.
• Fonts: If you’re interested in designing your own branding to bring into your graphics or email newsletters, you can explore thousands of unique fonts with tools like Google Fonts, Dafont, and Typeform.

The most important factor in social media content creation is to be authentic. Show off the work you’re most proud of while sharing a little bit of your personality throughout. By sharing your content and marketing yourself, along with using Agency Access’ database of over 100,000 contacts, you can create a social media content creation strategy that will set you up for success.