A social media presence is now a must for aspiring professional photographers, Claire Gillo shares her advice on getting noticed

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W elive in a world where millions of images and video content are uploaded to social media sites daily across the globe. On Facebook alone, over 300 million images are shared every day – and on Instagram, an average of 95 million photographs are uploaded to the platform daily. One of the greatest things about social media is having a worldwide audience right at your fingertips and the potential to connect with many millions of other users. However, with continuous input from multiple directions, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd and find a way to make an impact, particularly if you’re using these platforms in a professional capacity. So, to help you with your social media marketing, we’ve compiled a list of our top five tips. Our aim is to help you grow your audience and create a more engaging strategy that will ensure your work gets the likes, shares and retweets it deserves.

1. Where to start?

You’re probably on some type of social media platform already, as most people and businesses are. If not, then signing up to at least one site is a must. It’s a good idea to separate your business from personal accounts so you can adapt your approach and keep things professional. That’s not to say you can’t make your business account personal to you, but it just has to be done in the right way. Most photographers will already be familiar with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These platforms draw in huge numbers of users – Facebook alone has a massive 2.4 billion active members every month. Although the big networks are a great place to start, there are other platforms also worth exploring. Pinterest is great for stills imagery, while for short-form video, TikTok has grown rapidly over the past couple of years and now has over one billion active global users. For those unfamiliar with TikTok, it is a video hosting platform and its sole purpose is to entertain. It attracts a younger audience compared with Facebook, for example, but if you make behind-the-scenes videos, this platform may be worth considering.