By Rita Flórez

When Andrew Fingerman wrote PhotoShelter’s Social Media for Photographers, he wanted to provide shooters with essential Internet marketing guidance for serious professionals and aspiring hobbyists looking to grow their photography business online. The free 55-page book is an eBook that can be downloaded and read as a PDF. The guide is designed to share insights with photographers who want to get started or optimize their productive use of social media platforms like blogging, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Every quarter, PhotoShelter provides research reports dealing with marketing strategies that photographers can implement in their businesses. “Our management team is committed to providing marketing tools to achieve success online,” Fingerman says. “Beyond those tools, the idea with the guides is, what other resources can we put out there to help educate the photographers? Broadly, in the industry we’re carving out a place where we’re the go-to knowledge leaders in marketing your photography online. Rather than just putting our tools in the photographers’ hands, telling them to move forward and have success, we want to exhaustively research Internet marketing concepts and filter them down to the photographer so they can really learn what they need to know and get from the guides direct, actionable advice they implement [for] their online marketing strategy.”

Fingerman, the Vice President of Marketing at PhotoShelter, designed Social Media for Photographers to include tips on the ground rules for social media, including choosing where to participate, smart strategies to stand out, generating social sharing and quality links, suggestions for measuring progress, and a listing of tools to save time and make participation more effective.

“There are a lot of photographers out there wondering, ‘Is this for me? Maybe I don’t need a bunch of new friends. I need more business,’ ” Fingerman says. “There are a couple of different ways a photographer can focus in on getting true value out of social media. It’s really important that they think about it in advance and figure out what their true goals are.”

Fingerman recommends the photographer looking to dive into the waters of social media ask himself how he will benefit from using social networking and how he will measure the success of this marketing strategy once he’s using it. PhotoShelter CEO Allen Murabayashi echoes that sentiment. “Many photographers already have a Web site, photo blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but we don’t see many using these tools to effectively market and grow their photography business,” Murabayashi says. “By giving photographers the information they need to grow their social media presence, set goals, and measure their efforts, we are providing them with new strategies to promote their work and ultimately generate more revenue from their photography. When done right, social media enables photographers to build a following, engage in dialogue and find new opportunities to showcase and share their work.”

The guide is designed to benefit photographers new to social media, as well as those who wish to generate more results from their current efforts. Photographers can immediately start using the guide’s strategies and benefit from a healthy dose of real life examples from photographers implementing successful social media strategies across the Web.

There are a myriad of ways social media can enhance a photographer’s business, Fingerman says. One way, he explains, is through “brand owning.” “It’s the idea that social media is one more point where potential customers and people who might be referring work to you have to learn about you and your services, understand who you are and how you work and really potentially differentiate you from the competition in the content that you’re sharing out there,” he says. “To boil it down to the photographer level, you could say, ‘I’m going to use social media to become the best wedding photographer in the Portland, OR, area.’ It’s a way for you to connect with people in your specialty and establish yourself as the brand leader.”

Another area social media promotes is relationship management. “Social media is a platform for client interaction on their terms,” Fingerman explains. “Clients may not want to email back and forth with you or come to your studio and have a sit down session. But they may want to keep track of you via social media. It’s a way to stay on their radar screen.”

Social media also aids in direct sales by giving customers “sharability.” Applications like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter allow the customer to do a photographer’s marketing on his behalf. In fact, having a presence in social media can enhance a photographer’s search engine rankings, Fingerman explains. A Facebook or Twitter account becomes one more destination that increases a photographer’s online footprint.

“So when search engines like Google are looking for ‘New York City wedding photographer,’ they’ll crawl over certain aspects of your social media profiles and pull you up in their results,” Fingerman says. “People are out there searching for what you have to offer. Increasing your online footprint is critical because they’re not necessarily coming in through the front door of your Web site. They may find your Twitter or Facebook account. Then that becomes the destination they’re first interacting with you, and then they’ll travel to your Web site. So you want to increase your footprint and the many ways you can be found online. The result is a being ranked higher than your competitors in search engine results.”

Murabayashi agrees with Fingerman. “With social media, photographers can increase their online presence and multiply the ways their work gets found online. There are instant benefits, as well as ancillary benefits like better SEO [search engine optimization],” Murabayashi says. “To create this guide, we gathered insights and guidance from some of the world’s leading authorities on social media for business marketing and branding. We interviewed successful photographers worldwide to understand who’s getting it right and how we can share the secrets of their success with the greater community of photographers.”

PhotoShelter started releasing free research reports in 2009 and has developed a series of comprehensive resources that make their site a source for marketing a photography business online. To date, thousands of photographers have downloaded and benefited from PhotoShelter’s previous free reports: Photography Websites: Photo Buyer Survey, the SEO Cookbook for Photographers, and Google Analytics for Photographers. All of PhotoShelter’s free reports are available at www.photoshelter.com/mkt/research.

This guide complements the suite of social media sharing tools that PhotoShelter has developed for photographers who use PhotoShelter Web sites to display and sell their photography online. Embeddable slideshows for posting images on blogs, seamless sharing on Twitter and Facebook (and hundreds of other social networks) and RSS feeds are all available with all levels of PhotoShelter membership. Photographers can register for a PhotoShelter account at www.photoshelter.com. PhotoShelter can also be found on Twitter (www.twitter.com/photoshelter) and Facebook (http://bit.ly/PSfacebook).

Rita Flórez is a freelance writer based in Columbia, MO.