Social Media for Photographers – more thoughts!

I wrote last month about how I was active on Twitter with my Pictorem account, but my sales all seem to come from Fine Art America. That really confused me and made me think that perhaps Twitter was a waste of time.

But I’ve been thinking more about this, and it also plays into my current use of Mastodon as well. Mastodon is a sort of gentler, friendlier Twitter with more interaction and less drama perhaps! If you want to find me, I’m @[email protected]. It also seems to generate a lot of visits (both people and bots) to our Print on Demand sites that might, one day, result in sales but should at least improve some sort of search priority. To just use one example, I posted this image to Mastodon yesterday morning and used my Pixels URL for this moody black and white image from the English Lake District in the description of the image.

This did prove to be popular on Mastodon and as of now, it has been “boosted” by 111 people (which puts it back at the top of the timeline) and favorited 200 times (which doesn’t seem to do much…). When I look at my viewer stats on Pixels, I see 1461 visits, which is well above a normal day’s visits for my entire portfolio. Almost all of these will be bots, but on Google Analytics for yesterday (so not covering the full “life” of this), I see 22 visits by people to the page offering this image for sale. Pretty good, I thought.

But this use of the Pixels URL was an outlier for me. I almost always use a Pictorem link as that site offers free shipping. But images I sell always come from FAA and Pixels. So, here is my current thinking! Twitter and Mastodon (and Instagram and Facebook) are very ephemeral sites. You see something, you maybe like it, and then you are off to the next post or topic. The picture perhaps makes you think – that would be a great gift for my partner or would look good on my wall in the study. But you don’t immediately do anything about it – you just tuck it away in your memory.

Then later, you remember this and decide to take some action – but what on earth was it called, and who was the artist? Finding things on Twitter or Facebook is impossible, so instead you go to Google and describe what you recall of the image. Let me give you an example of an image I promoted recently.

In “incognito mode” to make sure it doesn’t reflect my own results, I typed “Morgantown WVU Coliseum moon” into the search, because that is all I could remember of the image I liked. And I get this:

As you can see, I have some competition, and I also have an older picture I took of this scene. But the first one that matches the image is in position 4 and is, as I expected, Fine Art America. There is the older version from Pictorem in row 2 and 3, but the only one that most people would see is the Fine Art America one and so they click that and buy it.

What I think this all means is that the social media work on Twitter and other sites is worthwhile and it doesn’t really matter which site is promoted. To some extent, not including a link might be a good strategy on Facebook as those posts apparently get better reach. And not always including links on Twitter and Mastodon is a good idea because some people don’t like sharing things with links.

The end result is that the buyer will hopefully find the image they are seeking and not be put off too much by the higher cost of shipping at Fine Art America.

Make sense? Be sure to tell me below in the comments!