Promoting Your Work

Whatever work you do, you can use social media to promote it. Good examples of what to promote include business services like photography and also community work like tenant advocacy.

Part One: Key Questions

The key questions are not what media to use, but:
1) What are you promoting?
and
2) Who is your audience?

Sit and brainstorm freely about these. Refine your plan later, but start by thinking very broadly. Then ask friends, neighbors, and coworkers. And then consider the strategies followed by competitors or opponents – but not necessarily to copy them.

Service businesses like photographers might find the following useful, though the article lists an impossibly comprehensive and expensive approach; browse it for ideas to pluck out:
“Social Promotion for Your Photography Business”

Tips from professional bloggers who do it 24/7 and have a big budget; again just pick out ideas:
“50 Experts Reveal How to Promote Your Blog with Just 3 Tools”

Part Two: Your Own Strategies

This is a lab session in which we pick out ideas from brainstorming and from the articles above to develop realistic strategies that require little or no budget.

Some ideas to consider:

1. Blogging
2. Email
3. Facebook
4. Pinterest
5. Commenting on others’ articles
6. Freebies
7. Business cards
8. Texting
9. Phone trees
10. Twitter

Hashtags

We will also look briefly at hashtags – what they are, where they are used, and whether it makes sense to use them for your projects. Background is at:
What are # (Hashtags) and How to Use them on Social Media.
(Spoiler: they are great for Twitter, little used on Facebook, require a plugin on WordPress).

Try these on Twitter: #weddingphotos, #EllisAct.