Setting up your Instagram page as a Photographer
- If you have a personal instagram page, turn that into your professional page, but turning it into a business page. That way you already have a base of followers you can start from. Your friends and family should be liking your work because they love you and that helps in the beginning!
- Get a scheduler app like Later or Preview or Plann or Planoly and play around with themes and ways to organize your photos. Pick 20 or so to start that match or have a theme associated so it looks clean.
- If you already have photos, or have a portfolio, a website, facebook page or are active on twitter etc, make multiple posts about you marketing your professional Instagram account.
- Use your real name as username. That way businesses would want to book you and know your personal brand. It is important to get business.
- Mention the locations you work in your bio. If you are in a certain town or city write that up and write "DM for Bookings"
- Create a custom email that looks professional and link it to your profile. For example: "[email protected]"
Setting up your network to be a successful photographer
- Follow the photographer pages that organize the best photos from other photographers. If you shoot portraits follow portrait pages, by searching through hashtags or nature for example, look for nature photography pages that aggregate the best photos.
- Get your friends and family in your photos. Sometimes photographers focus on one model, but we think it is interesting and your photos are more valuable if you have multiple people in a photo, or different sets of captivating subjects (humans!)
- Organize a meetup to meet other photographers. Take photos with them and tag them in the photos after you release them and talk about what you guys shot and why. Scopio has a Photo Walk Meetup in New York May 11, sign up if you are nearby.
- Post three times a week at least to start. Build a narrative around each post, and tag the person in the photo.
- DM people you admire just to say "hey love your work" starting to form those relationships from the get go will help you build relationships with your community as you grow, people will get excited to watch that transformation!
Get the right hashtags!
Scopio has built this hashtag generator to help you tell better stories. We built this with artificial intelligence to get you better hashtags to use, totally for free. http://hashtags.scop.io/
Opportunities will come after you start to get these steps moving!
Sell your photos and reach more people by joining our community on scop.io/submit
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