Our social media strategy at Wonderful Machine aims at two audiences: clients and our photographers, just like the information on our client and member blogs, respectively. We put somewhat more effort into creating content for clients because our goal is to get our photographers hired.
This month we turned our critical gaze to Pinterest, which can get overlooked as a useful marketing tool. In September alone we had 162,245 impressions on our pins, and 6,760 engagements. With this information in hand we decided to start building Pinterest boards based on specific specialties, beginning with a Food Photography board. Our plan is to make boards for each of our specialties over time.
We use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to share our Spotlight Photographer articles. These articles are an important way for us to promote our photographers’ abilities and projects, and posting them on these platforms helps draw attention to them. We had one runaway post about Shawn Hubbard’s photo being used for the new Madden game, reaching 1,100 visitors (our average this month being 129).
On Instagram, each day we share standout photos from our member photographers. Our most-liked post in September was an image of a camper in front of a star-strewn night sky by Jeff Wilson, with 180 likes.
The second-most popular image was of a frivolous businessman at the circus by Aaron Conway, with 153 likes.
We recently hit 14,331 followers on Instagram. We also use Instagram stories to share our spotlight blog posts, and these tend to get between 250-350 views each day.
One additional note: we tested a Google Ad campaign this month, using our specialties as keywords (“food photographer”, for example). With an admittedly small budget, this ended up accounting for 327 visitors to our site (organic search trouncing it with 5,995 visitors—word of mouth is the greatest marketing tool, after all).
Check in next month to see what we’ve been up to on our social media platforms!
To learn more about why social media is so important to your marketing strategy, watch our Member Open House on Instagram Best Practices.