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Make Instagram Simple

Lesson 23 from: FAST CLASS: How to Start a Photography Business

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

23. Make Instagram Simple

Lesson Info

Make Instagram Simple

Let's make Instagram a little bit more simple. Before you go and study best practices and nuances and all that kind of stuff. Because this is honestly where, how many of us can think of books and courses on how to use Instagram and how to do this and how to do that and how to effectively do this? There's some basics there where if you just understand the basics of this platform, you really don't need the best stuff. The best practices are designed to get you an extra 5% or 10% or a little bit quicker growth and so forth, okay. The basics are really straightforward. The medium itself is eye candy. Easy as that, eye candy. And that means if you're taking not so great images, there's nothing I could say, there's nothing a single platform, a single book or any instructor could do for you to help you be successful on Instagram. Because the platform is eye candy. That's the first thing that you have to just understand. That's it. This means that a non-visual story doesn't translate. If you h...

ave to write out what's happening in an image, it's not for Instagram. That's for something else, that's for maybe Facebook. That's for your blog, that's for something else but that's not Instagram. Think about the way you consume on Instagram. If you don't see a great image, you're just thumbing past everything, right? You're just looking for the next great image. You need to think about the image in a subject size. The subject size, when it comes to Instagram, the subject needs to be visible from your phone. I use this image for the background in the slide. Right here. That's a perfect example of a bad image for Instagram. It's great when you see it up on a big screen, you're like, "Man, that's cool." It's completely lost on Instagram. Because everybody's looking at their phones, their tablets, their computers from a small screen, it's gone. We have to have something that fits the cropping format because most of the time people are seeing it as the square before they're seeing it full. Which means that if your subjects are off to the side or anything like that, it doesn't really fit the format. And that's a big thing for your vendors. The people that are working with you for styled shoots, the people that are working with you for content that want Instagram-able stuff. Instagram-able, they want things that are square crop-able. That means any breathing room on the edges so they can put it on Instagram. We need a clear and visible story, it needs to be visually interesting as a thumbnail. Easy. Zoom out, see if you still like looking at the image when it's small. If you do, it's a good candidate for Instagram. It has to be cohesive with the brand and style, cohesive to the message that you're sending out. And group portraits are awesome for Instagram because you gotta tag every single person inside of it. If it's a great group portrait, tag every single person. It's good, that's a really good one. Tag relevant media outlets and chains. This is to you show you kind of examples. Again, you can refer back to these slides as examples of what to do here, okay. This is showing how one of these images gets reposted and retagged 33,873 likes from other accounts. 558, 5,765, this is in our account. This is gonna be a tricky thing because weddings have this in a little more abundance than let's say newborn photography. Newborn photography, it's difficult to find outlets, magazines, other things that want to publish or that are wide scale like that. Doesn't mean that there aren't. There are a lot of dress designers in the maternity side like So Trendy Accessories that have large followings. You just have to look for them. Look for all the people that help to do whatever it is that you do, even if they're indirectly involved. Vendors, venues and media. Now, this is the effect that it can have. This one image and I know you're like "I could have taken that picture with my iPhone." But you didn't. (audience laughter) This one picture have seen over 900,000 views between each of the different places that it's gone. We've only listed six here 'cause it's broad. And I don't know how many likes it's gotten from all that but it's been seen multiple times. This one picture, 6.8 million people with a 170,000 likes, we actually added this one up. Is that nuts? And it would never happen without tagging. So, that's the power of format, that's the power of tagging and getting everybody involved in the process. In case you missed it, details are very very tagable. So, if you're shooting weddings out there, your details in a square crop-able format are hugely tagable to the point where we create an entire course just on details that get published. Engage, like, reply, follow. This is a small thing on Instagram format where if you engage with your audience, you post comments, you reply, you like, you do those kind of things, it will feed your images a little bit more to other people. This is one of those smaller 10% type things. Post regularly, start one a week, aim for one a day. So, one a week means that in the beginning of your business, you're doing those test shoots, save up the great images. Save them up, start by posting once a week just to get the party started. When you've got a library of a 100 great images and you keep shooting more, then increase the frequency to one a day. Until your library is busting and you can't post enough by doing one a day. And then maybe you go to two a day. But slowly build it.

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