Love Facebook or not they are a force to be reckoned with in terms of sheer numbers. With approaching a billion users they can be one of the largest ways we can get our photography out in front of new customers and a great way to market our work. I have covered some tips in the past about using Facebook fan pages to market your work (check our one article here: Social media marketing for photographers).
Today I wanted to cover a very useful plugin that Facebook created for wordpress. This gives you a really quick and easy way to add social features to your blog to help get your work shared and increase your visibility. To add this plugin just login to your wordpress admin panel and in the plugins section do a search for “Facebook”. Once you install the plugin you will have to enter in an App ID, App Secret, and App Namespace from a Facebook app for your business. If you don’t already have a Facebook app creating one is very quick and easy. First go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps. Once you setup your Facebook app then enter in the App ID, App Secret, and App Namespace on the plugin settings page and you will be ready to get started.
This plugin allows you to do 6 main things to get your blog to be more social with Facebook. I’ll walk through all of the main feature here and if you have any questions I would love to hear them in the Facebook comments section at the bottom of the page 🙂
All of these feats can be turned on and customized in the plugins settings area once you install in.
– This option allows you to publish new posts to your timeline and also mention people in the post. This is a great feature for when you write a blog post about a shoot, you can now very easily mention your clients in the post if they are your Facebook friends to help get some extra visibility to your blog. It also saves a step from you posting your blog posts to Facebook manually.
Once you enable this there is one more step to complete in your Facebook app.
Now when you create a new article in WordPress it will publish to your timeline on Facebook and also allow you to tag people or pages with a new widget on the right side of wordpress.
– Everyone knows what the like button is, it’s on millions of websites now but can be a huge way of getting extra traffic to your site and having your posts spread around your Facebook Friends circles. It will show the like button (and the share button if you would like) at the very top of your post. You can see how it works by viewing the top of this article. You also have things you can customize on this button like if you would like to show faces of peoples friends that have already liked this page. It not only is a great way to get extra exposure to your site but also when someone already sees that a friend of theirs also likes your site helps to give you extra validation on how worthy your site really is.
– The subscribe button is pretty straightforward and lets a user subscribe to your public updates on Facebook. If you don’t want to have people be your friends but just subscribe to see your updates then this is a great button to have.
– The Send Button allows people to send your articles to their friends. They have the option to send your URL in a message to their Facebook friends, to a group wall of one of their Facebook groups, and as an email to any email address. If you added the send button as part of the like button in step 1 this isn’t needed, it’s the same button.
– This one is really cool. As people start to scroll down your page and get to a certain point (that you can control), they will see a small popup at the bottom right showing other articles they might like. It’s a nice way to showcase other posts that they might have missed and get them to stay around on your site a little more. The goal of your blog should be to really let people see who you are, what your style is and what you are passionate about so the more pages you can get them to see the better.
– Comments are a great way to engage people on your photo blog. With most comment systems people need to enter in their email address or other info that they might not want to give out. The Facebook comment box is awesome since they can just type directly into the comment box without having to do anything else (provided they are already logged into Facebook). When they are commenting they can also choose the post the comment to Facebook so it’s another way to get some traffic and eyes to your site!
Facebook can be a very strong way to market your photography, if you have any questions feel free to write them below or if you have a great way that you have been using Facebook let me know! You can also check our page out here and feel free to comment on our wall so we can chat: http://www.facebook.com/digitalphotobuzz
If you are looking for more marketing ideas for your photography business check out some of our other photography marketing articles.
If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google. I appreciate you spreading the word to your photo friends! Also remember to always start a conversation by leaving a Facebook comment at the bottom of the page. I love to hear from you.
