Strategies for Paying to Play
Lesson 7 from: Monetizing your Social Media Presence for Outdoor PhotographersColby Brown
Strategies for Paying to Play
Lesson 7 from: Monetizing your Social Media Presence for Outdoor PhotographersColby Brown
Lessons
Class Introduction
06:59 2Generating Revenue Through Social Media
19:04 3Selling Prints Online
14:40 4Image Licensing
10:41 5How does Sponsorship Work?
05:03 6The Significance of Getting Verified
06:15 7Strategies for Paying to Play
08:19 8Why use Facebook Pixels?
04:01Why Use Facebook Audiences?
04:03 10Creating Ads on Facebook
05:47 11Networking 101
11:36 12The Hidden Value of LinkedIn
08:40 13Marketing Campaigns & Brand Influencer Work
07:23 14Perfecting the Cold Email
14:00 15The Art of Pitching Clients
12:21 16Building Your Instagram Following
17:56 17Class Wrap Up
09:23Lesson Info
Strategies for Paying to Play
All right. Strategies for paying to play. So the idea of paying to play is essentially that you are willing to spend money in order to engage in social media, at least in some form or fashion. Now, what you can do is you can either create ads or you can boost posts. Now, on Instagram, you're creating ads, Facebook, you can do both, Twitter, you can push out tweets and you can create ads. Pinterest, a lot of the other networks out there, you can do this. And I think, I, for one thinks...I think it's highly advantageous. I know a handful of photographers who sit there and say, "I'm never going to pay for social media. Should be free for this billion-dollar R&D budget that they put into creating Facebook, they shouldn't charge us." I get it. It makes sense, right? But in order to actually reach more people, in order to reach more of your own following that you've built up or to reach new people that are a part of a new audience that you're hoping to build, the idea of boosting posts, ...
promoting posts, or creating ads can be beneficial for you. So, as I mentioned on Instagram, really, you can only do so much. But it's a great way in order for you to, in general, not just tied to Instagram, but boosting posts and creating ads are a great way to change kind of your target audience, to change the followers that you have. Because you can change the direction of who's seeing what. And it also can be quite beneficial when you're creating marketing campaigns. So oftentimes, when I create marketing campaigns, let's say I charge a company $12,000 to create a campaign. When I'm creating the bid and putting in those numbers, I'm building in the idea that I'm going to take a certain small percentage of that money that I'm charging a company. I know I'm going to be bringing that back and essentially putting it into boosting posts that are tied to this campaign. Because I want my organic reach to be as much as it is, as much as I can be, as large as it is, and I built that up. But at the same time, I want to reach more people of my followers. So maybe out of that 12,000, I'm going to reserve a $1,000 for the 6 or 7 different posts I'm going to push out there. I'm going to put some money behind them to make sure they're seen by more of the people that have actually chosen to engage with me. Adding in the value and the benefits to my company, making them happier, wanting them to work with me again, it's a great way to go about it. And sometimes you can even sit there and have it be something separate. Sometimes, I'll be working with marketing campaign, and I'll sit there and say, "Hey, here's the money for what I was thinking. This is what I'm going to charge." And by the way, it would be great if we can ask extra additional money and kind of boost some of these posts and reach more the people that are engaging with me. Sometimes they're like, "Yeah, that's a great idea." And I'm like, "Oh cool. I don't have to spend my money, I'm spending your money." It's my favorite way to go about it. So when you're boosting posts, essentially on Facebook, you can do this on mobile and on desktop. You're just clicking the blue Boost button underneath your post. That's going to pop up and show you a preview of what you see. And boosting posts are essentially the exact, what it sounds, you're taking that post and you're trying to show it to more people. Now, here you have the ability to make a couple different choices in terms of your audience, where it's going to be seen, budget and duration. Depending on your needs, these things vary quite drastically. A lot of times when I'm just boosting to boost, I'm just sitting here and selecting for my audience, people who like their page and their friends. So I want people that are engaged, and I also want to open up that audience just a little bit more to other people. When it comes to where it's going to be seen, you can kind of see Instagram's already checked here. So this boosted post will also be showing up on Instagram. This is also quite beneficial. You can do this from the desktop app, I believe, but not necessarily the mobile app currently. But either way, you can decide where it's going to be seen and how it's going to be seen. The original text, do know that once you actually boost a post, you cannot edit your post because Facebook has to determine that whatever you're saying is not offensive or meeting their guidelines. So they're going to sit there and approve this like they would approve an ad. But you can't go back through and say, "Oh, I'm spending $200 and I have $100 left over tomorrow." I misspelled a word. Can't do it. Got to start over. So benefits of using pay-to-play. Let's talk about that first, and I'll talk about strategies that I've actually used that work. So benefits of using pay-to-play drastically increases your content reach. Self-explanatory. I want a boost post to reach more people. This could be beneficial to me. Maybe I'm pushing out a link and I want people to purchase something, maybe I just want more engagement on a single image. Maybe I'm doing it because it's part of a marketing campaign. Regardless, can drastically increase how many people you're reaching. Can assist you in growing your followers. So every time I boost a post, then, you can actually reach more people. It's great. Hand pick your target. So you can hand pick to choose what your audience is...who you're going to reach out to, who you're going to hit with your posts. You can have it subjective use, so you don't have to do it in a perpetual way. You can sit there and do it once in every while. Multiple medians are available for you to do it, so you can push it out just on mobile or just on Instagram or just on Facebook. You have the ability to do all these things. And it can help you improve your organic reach. So let's talk about that really quickly. Effective strategies, Facebook works better than most. So the idea of pushing stuff out there, you can also again do it on Instagram and Twitter but Facebook gives you the most options and I find it to be the most beneficial. And even on Facebook, you can again push the things out to Instagram which can help. You can create ads that are catered towards the audience of your choice, so if you want to expand your audience to reach certain people that you feel you're not, you can obviously change and do that. So what I do if I want to increase my organic reach, which means my non-paid reach, oftentimes, I will go in and for any given month, every third post, I'm going to throw a little bit of money at it. Maybe 20 bucks, maybe 50 bucks, and when I push it out there every third post, I'm going to make sure that I'm going to engage as much as I possibly can on that post because it's going to reach a lot more people than it normally does. And so when that happens, I'm engaging with all those people and then Facebook is sitting there and saying, "Oh." Or Instagram, is saying, "Oh, you're getting a ton of engagement with these individuals." I'm asking them questions, I'm engaging, we're talking. And by doing so, you're increasing your Facebook algorithmic profile in which case, over time, usually not too long a time, you'll realize that your organic reach per post is growing. So you're using it subjectively every once in a while to ultimately increase the amount of engagement you're getting and who you're engaging with, which is different than who you've normally had as your followers. And in time, that increases everything, because you get more people following you, more engagement. So your Facebook is showing your stuff to more people. So it's helped your organic reach. An experiment with the interest, as I mentioned, this is where you can go in and say, "Hey, I want to boost this post but I want to sit there...I want to boost it to people who are interested in, say, Colby Brown photography. So you guys wanted to dip into a little bit of my followers, people that are like my followers." So you can boost your posts to connect with interest-like a page . Maybe CreativeLive, maybe National Geographic, maybe another photographer you feel has similar work to you but has a much larger following. These can help. And increase the reach of important posts for clients. So again, this is beneficial for marketing campaigns so I build them into my budgets. So what methods have you guys used? Have you guys boosted posts before? Anyone? Raise your hands if you've done it. A couple hands. Raise your hands if it actually helped. Yeah, kind of, half hands. It's beneficial, it can help. Experiment with it, don't be afraid to spend a little bit money because it will help you.
Ratings and Reviews
Linea Broadus
Colby's class was packed with great information for landscape photographers! From writing pitches to marketing with social media, he clearly explains how to achieve personal business goals. Thanks, Colby!
Beatriz Stollnitz
I was fortunate to be in the live audience for this course. If you (and I !!!) take the time to truly absorb the content presented and put it in practice, this course will pay for itself over and over and over. It is rare for someone at Colby's success level to be so open about the financial aspects of what they do, and the details of how they do it. Highly recommended!
Rodrigo Reyes
It was very interesting. I really recommend to other photographers who doesnt know so much how to make business using social media.