There’s absolutely no secret to this: Instagram posts are at an all time low when it comes to interactivity with your own following. Photographers have been feeling the burn for awhile because it can make clients harder to find and to market to. But what photographers haven’t necessarily known is that Instagram stories is the big thing that helps counter that problem. How?Well, Instagram is becoming more and more of a platform that is putting emphasis on stories sort of like Snapchat. To that end, people tend to spend more time there than going through their actual feeds. Indeed, Instagram will probably show you something from weeks ago anyway. If you consider this, then it becomes even tougher for photographers to market themselves. The reason for this is because photographers have traditionally used their Instagram sort of as a curated dumping ground. So here’s what you’re supposed to do:

• Keep your website
• Keep your website’s blog
• Keep your Instagram
• Treat your Instagram in a different way
• Treat your Facebook page in more or less the same way that you treat your Instagram

This idea is sort of a pyramid. So let’s go through it.

I want you to imagine the peak of a pyramid and that’s you. You are the person that is distributing content to everyone else. You’re creating images. But you have to get them out there to people. So to get them out there you first and foremost create a website portfolio of your own photography. These portfolios can be split up depending on the genre(s) that you cover. But in order for your website to stay relevant, it needs a blog. Why? Well, it’s one of the easiest and best ways to hack Google’s SEO and keywords. If someone is looking for a Charleston Based Portrait Photographer, you can go about buying adwords but that gets expensive over time. So instead you can create more and more content that Google needs to look at. Then you organically start to take over those search terms if you create the keyword rich content that always leads back to your website and blog.

Now, that’s sort of a given. One of the ultimate goals as a photographer when using Instagram is to get people to your website and book clients. You used to be able to do this with hashtags and putting out curated content. But now Instagram is killing reach. So in the same way that you try to feed your website with blog posts accordingly, you need to feed your Instagram portfolio. How do you do that? Think of Instagram stories and live feeds as your equivalent. BTS images and extra photos from your shoots can go there. When you go through your photos you should create three different subsets:

• The images that will go into your actual portfolio: the smallest amount of them
• The images from the shoot that will go on Instagram: This should be a larger selection but more curated
• The images that will go into your blog posts and Instagram stories: The images will be used to tease all of the others.

No one image should be part of either batch. The creme de la creme should be on your website. The pretty good stuff should go on Instagram. The teaser content should be fed out into the social spheres like fleeting content. And that fleeting content is the start of bringing people into your web. Does this sound crazy? Oh lord yes, but at the moment of publishing this post there doesn’t really seem to be a better way.