Social media has proven to be a powerful tool for many photographers when it comes to marketing their business and booking clients.

There are a million articles and courses available that all promise to tell you the best strategies to grow your following and show you how to beat the algorithm and it can all become pretty overwhelming.

Using social media effectively for your business comes down to working smarter, not harder, and it’s about so much more than just amassing followers and gaming the algorithm.

In Episode 23 of FilmingLife: The Podcast for Photographers & Filmmakers, Courtney Holmes and Allison Redmon sat down for a chat with our very own Marketing Manager Jill Seamer to discuss the best way family filmmakers can use social media in their business.

The episode is filled with so many great tips & ideas that we thought we’d share 5 of our favourites here on the blog for easy reference.

Forget reach and build relationships (and don’t post and run!)

It’s hard to put your work out there for everyone to see, and if you don’t get much reaction or reach it’s easy to be discouraged and stop being consistent with sharing, or give it up altogether.

Instead of worrying about how many people are liking/commenting/following, focus instead on the people behind the accounts that are seeing your posts. Get to know them, interact with their posts and start building a relationship with them.

Over time you’ll build up a following of genuine people who are interested in you and your work and have the potential to turn into booked clients.

Use your social media accounts to drive people to your website

Social media is such an easy, inexpensive way to share your business, but one of the downsides is that you ultimately have no control over it.

Facebook & Instagram have been known to disable and shutdown accounts with no warning or explanation, and if that were to happen to you, you’ll want to have a back-up plan and alternative way to continue reaching out to your followers.

Setting up an email list that people can subscribe to via your website means that you’ll always have that audience available to you (just make sure you export a csv list of the names & email addresses to your computer from time to time as a back-up).

You can share exclusive things that are only available to those people on your mailing list, and it gives you a captive audience, not bound by the mercy of the social media gods.

Make sure your first name & location are highly visible on your profile.

One of the biggest mistakes we see time and time again are Photographers & Filmmakers who don’t list their first name or their location anywhere on their profile (or their website for that matter). This is especially true if your business name doesn’t include your personal name at all.

People want to feel like they know who they are talking to, and they also want to know where in the world you are. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a business you love and want to support, only to discover after a lot of time scrolling and clicking that the business doesn’t service your area.

Make it as easy as possible for people to build a relationship with you by fixing these 2 key issues right now.

Share your films and share them more than once

When it comes to sharing videos on Instagram you have a number of different options and there’s no reason why you can use them all!

Choose the most visually & emotionally engaging part of your film to share as a one-minute snippet via your feed. Upload the full film to your IGTV. share parts of it via your stories.

Whatever way you share it, don’t be afraid to share the same film more than once. Chances are, only a fraction of your followers will see it the first time.

For Facebook, the biggest mistake you can make when sharing your film is to just share the Vimeo or YouTube link to your film and not upload it directly to the platform.

Facebook doesn’t like it when people leave, and so posting a link to somewhere else tells Facebook that your account is actively trying to pull users away and it won’t show it to anyone.

So take the time to upload it to your Facebook page directly and keep the Facebook overlords happy!

Word to the wise: when you first upload your film to Facebook it takes a while for the High Definition version to be processed, so the quality will look pretty average as it shows the 240p version while it processes the 1080p one, so don’t think that it’s gonna be a low-res version forever!

Share your own personal stories

When it comes to booking a service as personal as inviting a filmmaker into their home, the people looking to book want to do so with someone they feel comfortable with. Someone who feels like a friend.

The best way to build relationships and reach prospective clients is to make yourself relatable and share your own stories on your social media accounts.

This doesn’t mean you have to bare your soul and share every tiny little detail. It can be something as simple as what you’re cooking for dinner, what you’ve been up to that day, a funny story about something your kid did, or even just some behind the scenes editing stuff.

People want to connect to the person behind the business, so take advantage of things like Instagram Stories to let people get to know the face behind the films.