mdolla: Life-Saving Instagram Tools For Photographers

Instagram is the perfect social networking site for photographers to show off their work and attract new clients. Simone Bramante, Dirk Bakker, Robin Ryan and Mike Cus are a few of the photographers that have used Instagram.

Instagram serves many purposes for professional photographers. They can use it to build their reputation and improve the quality of their pictures. It’s also a great way to connect with other photographers and admire each other’s work.

“Instagram has become home to over 300 million users in the four years it’s been around, and it seems ready to only get bigger,” states Robin Ryan, a professional photographer and author at Digital Photography School. “300 million is a big, big number. It can seem overwhelming, but it’s a great tool to not only create community, but also to become a better photographer.”^[1]

It’s easy to see why photographers are using Instagram. A couple of weeks ago, the company stated that it had over 600 million active users.^[2] The bad news is that photographers have a difficult time standing out – unless they use the right tools.

Here are some great Instagram tools that every photographer should use.

1. Crowdfire

Deciding who to follow and unfollow should be a major part of your Instagram strategy. If you follow people that are interested in what you share, they may follow you back and share your content. However, if you follow people that don’t follow you back, you will run into a couple problems:

Your account can look spammy if you have a high following to follower ratio.
Your feed will be cluttered with a lot of content that isn’t relevant to your business (or worth sharing with your followers).

Crowdfire is a great tool for managing the accounts you follow. It can automatically unfollow accounts that:

Are dormant
Haven’t followed you back
Have been flagged for spam

Using Crowdfire to clean up the accounts you follow will help you attract more followers of your own.

2. ScheduGram

As a professional photographer, you need to make sure your posts receive as much exposure as possible. You need to schedule your Instagram posts wisely to gain traction. If you only offer services to clients in your area, you need to make sure your posts are seen by people living near you.

ScheduGram allows you to schedule all of your Instagram posts in advance. If you find that the majority of your posts are seen while you are asleep or out taking new pictures, then you can still get the exposure you need.

3. Like4Like

The Instagram algorithm is built off social likes. The more likes your posts receive, the higher they will rank in the Instagram feed. It can be difficult to get likes when you don’t have a high follower count yet, so you should try using Like4Like.

This tool allows you to exchange Instagram likes with other users. This helps everyone rank higher in the feed.

However, it’s important to be smart with the people you collaborate with. Make sure they are legitimate accounts (not made specifically for exchanging likes or creating spam). You also want to exchange likes with accounts that have a similar audience. Again, if you are a local photographer, you should try to exchange likes with Instagram users in your area, since their followers are more likely to become future clients. Ideal Instagram users would be local news sites, local web developers or nonprofits.

4. Soldsie

Photographers are a dime a dozen in many communities, particularly urban regions like New York City and California. Creating custom biographies is a great way to make yourself stand out. Soldsie is a great tool that lets you create custom biographies with links to your website.

Here is an example of a hypothetical biography a photographer could use:

“Mike Nelong is an esoteric and landscape photographer from San Francisco. You can visit his website to see more samples of his work.”

You want to make sure your biography is compelling and has a unique call-to-action.

5. Iconosquare

Too many photographers post on Instagram without knowing whether their content is actually engaging their followers. If you aren’t sure whether your posts are working you should create an account with Iconosquare.

Iconosquare is like a Google Analytics account for Instagram. Instead of measuring traffic, it monitors likes, comments and other engagement metrics.

Not only does this tool help you optimize your Instagram marketing strategy, it also helps you know what types of photographs people are most interested in. This is important because the photographs that you like best may not be the ones your clients are looking for. Your Iconosquare data will help you improve customer satisfaction by taking better photographs.

Conclusion

Instagram is a great platform for budding photographers. However, it’s also becoming very crowded since so many photographers are using it to reach clients. You need to take advantage of valuable Instagram tools to get more exposure for your services.

Featured photo credit: Pexels via pexels.com

Reference

[1]	^	Digital Photography School: 12 Steps to Successfully Promote Your Photography On Instagram
[2]	^	The Verge: Instagram has doubled its monthly active user base in two years