New Facebook Changes in 2013 For Your Photography Business
by guest blogger Stanna Johnson
Break out your Facebook ads manager, fix a steaming pot of coffee, and get ready to get to work on your advertising and marketing for your photography business. As always Facebook keeps changing the rules and advertisers can expect to see a lot of changes on the horizon. So it’s important that you’re ready for them.
2013: Changes You Can Expect on Facebook
Increased Mobile Use Increases Activity
Keeping your Facebook page updated and active with regular postings is increasingly important for your photography business. The mobile market will continue to spread, that means more Facebook users and a convenient way to check your news feed. That means that content you post will be fresh for a shorter period of time and you might want to consider increasing your post regularity to keep up with the everyone else.
Increased Hyper-Targeting
Although Facebook features like Custom Audiences are still relatively new it has been a success. Expect another round of updates to help businesses specifically target more efficiently via existing contacts and new prospects within a niche. What will these updates look like? While we don’t know for certain if anything huge is coming down the pike it’s more likely that features like Custom Audiences will broaden, giving you more options to target more people. Which is a crucial element to find new clients for your Photography Business.
Increased Advertiser Vision
Facebook is able to update their features so regularly because now they are a public company and they need to make money. Advertisers are quick to learn the ropes and in return understand to use the changes to their own advantage. With the current changes, we’re seeing more options for B2C (Business to Customer) and B2B (Business to Business) applications. We’re also seeing posts and most advertisements trend toward visual aids—i.e. infographics, charts, and other images. You can expect to experience better results from visual content. Ads will need to be more visual and more targeted. Check out an example of Page Posts here.
A Gravitation Toward Facebook
Social networks are everywhere! Some users are spread fairly thin across a wide number of different networks. However, smaller networks were losing steam and millions of people were streamlining their social experience by flocking to the more popular sites. And guess which network is picking up the stragglers? That’s right; Facebook is like debt consolidation for social media users. I expect that Facebook is going to make a lot of smaller networks near obsolete in 2013.
A Bigger Influence on Actual Customers
According to statistics cited by Jayme Pretzloff, Online Marketing Director at Wixon Jewelers, 70% of social media users claimed that social advertising had no influence in their decision to purchase goods in 2011. However, that number dropped dramatically to 35% in 2012. Many are predicting an even bigger number for 2013, meaning a reversal of trend. That the larger number is influenced by Social Media in their buying decisions.
It’s time for you to get on the bandwagon and learn the tools when it comes to Facebook for your photography business. The more targeted your audience the better the results will be. What is your experience with Facebook? Please let us know.
My main concern with Facebook is protection of my images from unauthorised downloading. I would love to display my pictures without having to deface each of them with a copyright notice (not that it makes any difference to the serious ‘I want that picture regardless’ thief). I don’t know how to stop this and it’s this area that makes me sceptical of displaying my work. I know you will say the amount of people who see my work is greater than the people who will steal my picture, but, the people who steal my pictures are the very people I want to sell to! Am I alone in this. Am I old fashioned in these thoughts. Am I wrong to charge my client for a service and let others freely download what isn’t theirs?
I like Facebook as a marketing tool but the openly share everything with everyboby doesn’t make good business sense to me.
I agree with Tony, as soon as you upload your photos you lose control of them. This is from Facebook’s terms of service:
“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License)”
You can read more here: http://daemontown.com/dont-upload-photos-link-instead/