Many treat the month of August as a holiday, but that didn’t stop our social media videos, particularly on Facebook, from going practically viral!
As usual, Wonderful Machine’s social media efforts are geared toward clients as we aim to showcase our many photographers. Therefore, we share our members’ work on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, YouTube, and Twitter. Typically, our Instagram and LinkedIn presences steadily increase in engagement and visibility, while our Pinterest holds the crown for most likely to succeed. Our Facebook and Twitter presences tend to show a little more unexpected fluctuation, which you’ll see below.
We gained 53 followers on Instagram this month and reached 3,732 accounts. 1,480 of those accounts reached were non-followers, thanks to Instagram’s new re-share feature that allows users to share our posts to their stories.
Our most successful post this month promoted the images included in the Creative in Place: Road Trip emailer.
The second most popular image came from Norfolk, United Kingdom-based photographer Chris Ridley, whose lovely August 10 photograph of a man in the shadows at a port garnered 35 likes.
On Pinterest, our social media platform with the most traffic, we saw 89K monthly views in August. This represented a 49% increase over the previous month. Moreover, recently, our photo editors have been pulling photos from our photographers’ websites to build out our boards for each specialty. This effort may account for a significant part of this growth.
We had 229 more saves compared to last month and saw a 43% increase in outbound clicks. Our most-viewed specialty boards for this month remained the same: Travel Photography, Portrait Photography, Music & Performing Arts Photography, and Industrial Photography.
We increased our following on LinkedIn from 3,190 to 3,217 for the month of August. We did, however, see a general decrease in activity and traffic for our LinkedIn, by 24%. Our most popular post for this month featured Stephanie Avilés’ story about D.C.-based photographer Edgar Artiga’s shoot for the WIRED magazine: “The Gamer Doc: Edgar Artiga’s Colorful Portraits for WIRED.”
On Facebook, we’ve actually seen a slight decrease in people reached by post at -9%. Our photographer videos, which we sometimes post to Facebook, saw a dramatic increase in 3-second views of 800%.
One of those videos was from Brooklyn-based Janelle Bendycki‘s work with Abercrombie Kids.
The most popular post on Facebook was again — like on LinkedIn (conspiracy?) — one promoting Edgar Artiga’s photographs of the doctor gamer Lindsey Miglore.
Wonderful Machine uses YouTube to present behind-the-scenes videos, short videos of our consulting projects, and our Member Open House videos.
Speaking of the latter, on August 17th, photo editor Greg Jones reviewed the self-assigned projects of three photographers: Philadelphia-based David Fonda, Alhambra, California-based Tiffany Luong, and Manchester, United Kingdom-based Duncan Elliott. Honore Brown moderated.
Our most popular post on Twitter this month was, surprisingly, the same post from last month. On Twitter, we have been steady in followers at about 7,200. This past month our tweets have garnered 3,047 impressions and our profile has received a measly 302 unique visits.
Kevin Arnold // British Columbia, Canada
Brand 88 Ranch pic.twitter.com/rVMwqTzmBm
— Wonderful Machine (@wonderflmachine) July 29, 2021
While Twitter isn’t the most popular social media platform for photography-related inquiries and searches, we’d still like to substantially increase our engagement there over the next month.
Have questions about how we promote our photographers? Check out our Membership page. Want to know how you can get the most out of your Wonderful Machine membership? Check out our Jumpstart page, or just reach out!