Last Updated: February 15th, 2020

Inspired by this thread on Reddit, a good topic of discussion is how to control your social media image. While this conversation can go in many different ways, for today we are going to specifically discuss Instagram, your feed, and how to best attract your ideal photography clients.

The information contained here will be less about “photography,” and more about defining your brand image, and how you want social media marketing efforts to reflect your brand.

What is your brand about?

Defining what types of images you should populate your Instagram feed becomes a lot easier once you sort out…what your brand is all about…

Some of the simple things you need to square away with this include:

• Is your Instagram feed for personal or business purposes?
• What is the service you are trying to promote?
• What is your photography “niche”?
• Do you have a clearly defined style?
• Who are you trying to attract?
• What are you trying to get people to do when they find your Instagram? Like, follow, contact you for services?

We’re sure you could probably think of some other things as well (feel free to share in the comments at the end!).

How we apply our brand to our Instagram posts

While your answers to the questions we posed above may vary depending on what you are trying to achieve – we would like to show you how we apply our underlying Hand and Arrow Photography brand to the posts we put out on IG.

Note: Before we begin, keep in mind that social media is this consistent experimentation. It takes time to find what the right types of things are to post, and over time your specific goals may shift, and so too will your content to some extent.

But First…Why we use Instagram…

With Hand and Arrow Photography, our main purpose is to attract clients looking to have their weddings photographed. By extension, we also love delving into the world of couples photography in general – often doing engagement shoots, “Day After” sessions, anniversary shoots, and so on.

We occasionally do other shoots as well – such as family, maternity, and newborn photography – but these are not our focus (we do them when we get serious inquiries for them, mostly through word of mouth referrals).

On the personal side of things, we try not to overshare the nitty gritty of our lives, but will share things we particularly care about that we think other people might find interesting. We set up a travel blog on our website for this reason – to showcase our travels around the world such as to Iceland.

With all these things in mind…we approach Instagram not just for our personal benefit, but because it is a platform that can legitimately help people find out about us, and want to book our service(s).

In fact, the vast majority of our bookings come from people finding us through Instagram hashtags. This is hugely important, and it’s why we take what we put up (and don’t put up) on our IG feeds to be so important.

Now for the brand application

In order to control the content on our Instagram feed, we begin by scheduling posts using Later.

If you are unfamiliar with this platform, we recommend it very highly. We have tried a number of social media scheduling apps, and this is the best we could find. The distinct selling point for us is it’s unlimited to use free feature. This is a great way to begin experimenting with post scheduling, and can handle a pretty decent number of scheduled posts. Paid plans increase the number of social media accounts that can be be posted to, and the total number of posts you can schedule in advance. Well worth checking out.

One of the most useful features it includes is a preview of what your feed will look like. Using this type of tool will help you make sure you are maintaining a consistent look, and reveal consistency in your image content. This is what this feature looks like:

In conjunction with scheduling our posts, we also aim to only showcase the best of our work. Let’s be honest, people are not attracted to mediocrity, and in a world where there are so many photographers out there – you need to let your best shine through at all times.

Instagram has become a real extension of our portfolio. While we do have some static galleries and blog posts on our website, with so many people finding us through IG, this is one of the first interactions they have with our work. As a result…this is a hugely important social media platform to get right.

As we mentioned above, our main purpose with Instagram is to promote our brand and attract new clients. As you can see from our sample feed, almost every image in the 15 visible are of couples. Most of these are from recent engagement sessions, a few from styled shoots, and some from recent weddings we photographed.

Only 1 of these images is personal – and our purpose for putting this on our feed was very intentional. It showcases Jes’ in the middle of the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley, California. It’s an adventurous photo from our travels, allows us to showcase (and promote our work to) a new location, and allows us to engage more on a personal level with our followers without making it a daily recurring thing.

Our brand is intentionally less about us, and more about the couples and clients we work for; and this is revealed through the photos we share on Instagram.

Once you have a good portfolio of photos to share on Instagram, actually constructing a uniform and cool feed is pretty simple when you keep your brand motivations and goals in mind. Our biggest struggle early on was just not having enough content to warrant the amount of updates we would have liked to have made.

How to get good photos to use on Instagram

Depending on your photography subject(s), getting content may be more or less difficult – but will generally require a good deal of effort.

Landscape photographers may have it easier because they don’t need to arrange for models or book portrait client sessions to be able to showcase work, but on the flip side, they will need to do a good deal of traveling to get great shots that can compete with some of the top landscape photographers in the world (and on IG).

Alternatively, wedding/portrait photographers like ourselves need to put more effort up front to get clients, arrange styled shoots, pay models, etc. – but once you start to see a more steady stream of clients booking with you, the amount of content increases pretty rapidly.

What about the text of Instagram posts?

Let’s be real: most people using Instagram are probably not going to be reading the text you include with your images all that much, but there are people who do and these people acquire a lot of value and insight into who you are based on what you write.

Depending on the day, we put more or less effort into writing captions for our posts on Instagram. We always put something in there, but can admit this is an area that can feel quite time consuming. This is especially true when we are busy with other things that need to be given higher priority. In a perfect world where marketing time was seemingly unlimited, here is a set of tips we would apply to ALL of our Instagram posts:

5 Tips for Writing Great Instagram Captions

1). Know your audience. We talk about the importance of knowing your brand a lot because it will help you to target your writing to better capture their attention. How you write for 50 year old philosophy scholars will probably be different than how you write to capture the minds of teenage girls wanting to become photographers.

If you are unsure who your audience is, a good starting point is to write out some attributes of people you are trying to connect with, then writing text and posting image content that reaches for them.

2). Short and sweet. If you want the entirety of your caption to show on users feeds without requiring them to click to expand for more information, you should keep the text to 125 characters or less. Typically, we mostly aim to post short text content. From time to time, we will mix it up and post something more long winded, but this type of content is more intended to reach directly to our biggest fans who are heavily invested into our brand.

3). Put the most important words at the start. Sometimes, people who are inexperienced with writing or how social media works in general can miss the point of writing a caption. In addition to being short and sweet, you also want the most important points to be addressed immediately. Eliminate run on sentences and being too wordy. Also, any hashtags and mentions should generally be retained for the end of the post.

4). Use hashtags. Hashtags are crucially important to your success on Instagram. We’re going to need to do a whole post on this topic alone (until we write and publish our own article post about this topic, please see the great article posts below!), but a good starting point is to research other photographers in your niche and start using some hashtags they are using.

• The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Hashtags for 2019

• The Ultimate Guide to Using Instagram Hashtags to Grow your Followers

• The 2018 Instagram Hashtag Guide—How to Use Them and Get Results

• The Ultimate Guide to the Best Instagram Hashtags for Likes

• Instagram Marketing : The Ultimate Guide To Instagram Hashtags In 2019

• UPDATE: How to Use Instagram to Market Your Photography Business — After writing and publishing the article you are reading now, we went ahead and wrote and published this linked article post. While this article post isn’t necessarily an ultimate or definitive guide on using Instagram Hashtags (like the guides provided above), in this article post we do speak about Instagram Hashtags, briefly, in context of the much more broad topic of using Instagram to market your photography business.

5). Use questions and calls-to-action. One of the best ways to inspire actual interaction with your post on Instagram is to include questions for them to answer and calls-to-action like “click the link in our profile to go to the blog post.” You probably don’t want to do this sort of thing in every post, but do it once in and while and see how your likes, comments, and other interactions jump a bit.

Conclusion

We aim to keep our Instagram feed as consistent as possible. The specific photos we select typically fall into portrait photography of couples – though from time to time we do mix things up. There is nothing wrong with a little content diversity, but keep in mind the biggest brands on Instagram have success by keeping their content very selective and niche.