Instagram Is NOT Dead / Should Professional Photographers Still Post to Instagram?

for the past year or so there's been a blitz of videos from content creators telling you that instagram is dead and instagram does not care about photographers so why should you care [Music] hey everyone i'm kevin patrick-robbins i am a full-time professional photographer who makes a living as a full-time professional photographer while i'm also a content creator i do not make my living doing this in fact i currently don't make any money doing this and i'm stressing this point because your goals as a professional photographer posting to social media are very different than those of a content creator posting to social media their primary objective as a content creator is to get mass engagement that supports their metrics for brand deals and reaching an audience for their digital products and look i'm not trying to shade content creators at all because i'm one of them i just want to make it clear to you that the objectives of a content creator are very different than those of a professional photographer we have to start by acknowledging and accepting the fact that instagram has never cared about photographers it was not built for photographers its primary user base was not is not and never will be professional photographers instagram became a platform that photographers flocked to because it's an image first social media platform it was relatively easy to get your work out there you only saw images from people you followed and in the early days there was no advertising at all when i open instagram and scroll through photos i do so for maybe a few minutes a day i've curated the list of accounts that i follow and i use the favorites list feature to interact with the accounts that i care about and who i want to know that i am out there looking at their work but most of the time when i'm scrolling i'm not liking images i'm not commenting on images i'm opening the app i'm taking a look around and then i'm closing the app and i suspect that's how most people are using instagram nowadays and if you dig into the statistics of a post and you look at the posts reach versus how many people have liked it or how many people have commented on it it's usually about ten percent of the people who it reached maybe liked it and one percent left a comment and we all know instagram recently started prioritizing video and not long ago they announced that even the stills feed will change to a full screen 9x16 vertical soon they're not making these changes to screw over photographers they don't care about photographers they're making these changes because that's what keeps people on the platform longer it keeps people in the app longer so they can serve more ads to them it's not about you it's about money there's a reason tick tock is the most popular social media platform in the world right now it's it's what people want that's what people are engaging with they are watching liking and commenting on short form content now speaking of liking and commenting if you find this video helpful please click the like button and leave a comment tell me how you're using instagram for your photography business so what should you do continue posting on instagram create more reels add tick tock to the mix move to tick-tock completely it's really up to you where you want to put in the effort but my recommendation is to first understand who your target audience is and where they are what apps are they using ignore the content creators whose primary audience is content consumers engagement drives their income engagement goes up their income goes up engagement goes down their income goes down if you're a professional photographer whose primary source of income comes from getting hired to create still photography or motion imagery for clients you absolutely should be posting your work to instagram as often as possible for us professional photographers whether commercial photographer editorial photographer fashion headshots weddings boudoir newborns whatever all we need is one person to fall in love with one image who will then hire us and pay us thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars to create imagery for them for their business or for their clients business something to consider is that instagram is not your portfolio but you can think of it as your extended portfolio when a client comes to your website and then they want to see more of your work they go to instagram it should be a combination of your extended portfolio your personal sense of taste style and aesthetic and your personality also instagram like your email list plays into recency bias recency bias is the concept in behavioral economics that suggests for our purposes that you are more likely to be hired for a job if the person doing the hiring has recently seen your work if an art buyer has seen your work recently you are more likely to be asked to bid on a project than someone whose work they haven't seen in months or years they need to know that you are out there working if you're producing work on a regular basis why would you ignore a popular platform that is still used by hundreds of millions of people every day the great news is you don't need ten thousand fifty thousand or a hundred thousand people following your account on instagram to get jobs anymore you only need to get your work seen by the right people wired magazine founder kevin kelly wrote a really great article a really well-known article on on his website called a thousand true fans i'll link to it below and uh i highly recommend you head on over to his website check it out and read it do you need to post instagram stories and reels no but it wouldn't hurt the way i use instagram stories is to share my sense of personal taste i share music that i'm listening to other images i find on instagram that i love and am inspired by an interior design and architecture images that are in line with my personal design aesthetic it lets people who are following my account get a better understanding as to the way i see the world so if you're a commercial photographer who primarily works with agencies and art producers then you have to post on instagram you should also be posting to twitter facebook tick tock behance and commune which is a new social media platform that i will link to below if you're a direct to consumer photographer you can ignore behance and commune instead make sure you're blogging every single session or event on your website post images and links to those blog posts on pinterest and your google business listing and if you're a headshot photographer post the link to every session you do on linkedin if you shoot a session on locations such as conservation areas beaches or basically any location that also has a google business listing you can also post your images to that listing for other people to see you can even drop an unobtrusive watermark into the corner of your image so people can maybe look back and say oh i love this image i wonder who took it oh it was taken by blackwood studios i'm going to check them out and this doesn't have to be a long or tedious process personally i have automated everything through zapier and i created a custom social media posting database that i use in airtable because i'm a nerd but you can just use a service like later.com and for anything that it can't post to just post it on your own the best thing that you can do is just stop checking your engagement numbers it doesn't matter you're not posting images on instagram for engagement you're posting to share your work as a photographer social media is just a small part of your marketing strategy don't beat yourself up if you stop posting for a few days a few weeks or a few months i've been known to take long breaks myself and that's okay don't ignore instagram but also don't stress yourself out if you haven't posted to instagram for a while thanks for watching and look if you've made it this far you might as well hit the subscribe button and 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