Hey there, photographer friends! This one’s for you. Today I wanted to talk a bit about how Instagram has been such a valuable tool for me as I grow my photography business. I can use it as a landing page, to showcase my work, and also as a funnel to channel prospective clients in to my website where they can learn more about me and hopefully book my services. Instagram is a powerful marketing tool, and as it’s free, it’s a really convenient one for photographers to immediately start using, no matter where you’re at in your entrepreneurial journey.

Let me share a few of the ways that Instagram has become a killer resource for me to share about my work. You’ll be able to see all of these strategies implemented in my own feed as an example!

#1 | Instagram is visual, so it works great as a portfolio.

Whether or not you have a website where you can showcase galleries upon galleries of images, Instagram can work as a makeshift online portfolio. You can curate your feed, only sharing your best work, and you can even tag other people, like other vendors or clients, to encourage the social aspect of this top social media platform. It’s easy for friends to tag you in their photos when they post the images you took of them, so your Tagged In tab on your profile becomes an additional gallery of client work. You can also utilize Instagram Stories to share even more photos, especially collages where someone can see a variety of images from the same session all at once. There are so many places to include your work to draw in prospective clients through engaging captions and hashtags.

#2 | Get personal in your Stories.

Not only can you include personal tidbits in your captions, but Stories is a great place to show your face often without messing with the frequency or aesthetics of your feed posts. On of the best ways you can utilize Stories, in my opinion, is by addressing things that users might go to your website to learn, like answering common questions or providing additional details about your services that you can save in a Story Highlight on your profile for your audience to reference later.

A few other ideas for things you can do in your Stories to get more personal and connect with your clients is to share behind-the-scenes footage of your sessions or your editing process, talk about your personal life/family (professionally, of course!) to help your audience get to know you better, or to showcase/advertise new products or services as they launch. Stories will show at the front of your audience’s Story list each time you post, so the more frequently, the better! It’s a great way to stay top-of-mind with your audience.

#3 | It’s called “social” media for a reason!

I’m not a big fan of doing things with my business just because other photographers are doing them. That’s not a good enough reason for me — I need to make sure that going that route feels purposeful and adds value to my business and services. I’m the same way with establishing myself on different social media platforms. I was only going to become active on Instagram if it was worth it, and it totally is for me. That’s because I streamline my Instagram planning (more about that later!) so I’m not wasting all of my side hustle time posting on the fly and struggling to come up with content. I plan my content in advance and then block out a chunk of time each day that I know I can engage and interact with other Instagram users to support a local community around my profile.

#4 | Create a rotation of categories for efficiency.

Here is my favorite part of my Instagram marketing strategy: my content rotation. Developing a rotating list of content that will be published throughout the month allows me to plan my posts efficiently in batches, saving my marketing time for other areas of my business or to market on additional platforms.

I start my content rotation by coming up with a list of topics that I love to talk about in my business and on my Instagram feed, like sharing recent sessions, highlighting local vendors, sharing business tips for other photographers, or offering marriage and relationship advice (because I believe your love isn’t just about the wedding, it’s about the lasting relationship!). Because I have these categories clearly defined, it’s super easy for me to come up with all the content at once as I’m planning for the following month and then schedule the content in a rotation that offers diversity for my audience. This way, if they don’t connect with one aspect of my content, they’re sure to have other content they vibe with that comes around later, so they’ll stick around.

These are my top tips for photographers using Instagram! What would you add to this list?