Everyone wants more likes, shares, follows or even just a little more attention in the social media profiles. My own Instagram profile is really quite limited, usually hovering round about the 230 mark. I took the course offered by photographer Scott Bakken entitled
Instagram Essentials: Build your Brand, Grow your Community to address the lack of engagement in my Instagram profile.
The course is a short one, some 40 minutes and it does not come with some massive secret that will unleash a flood of engaged followers. It does however have some good insights, almost a philosophy to follow.
He starts with four tips
- Keep it consistent
- Keep your aesthetic
- Find your tribe
- Connect with others
And these really are the themes which run throughout this course.
This course would be a complete waste of time unless you make a positive effort to make the time to follow some of the ideas that he puts forward. A genuine and engaged following takes a great deal of time to build up, and there is no better time to start than now! So, he advises, don’t be overwhelmed with what you don’t know, or the equipment that you do not have, just work with what you have in front of you.
The starting point is what do you enjoy. That is what you should be photographing, be it landscapes or people or lifestyle, but be consistent. Scott’s project for this class is for the listener to take three photographs of the place that tell your story….. three, of course, because that is one line of your Instagram grid, and this will start to promote your consistency.
Now I have a bit of a problem with this advice for two reasons:
- I do not really know what my story might be.
- I am influenced by and like a number of very different styles and interests.
Scott does suggest that there is no reason why someone should not have two (or more) Instagram accounts, so that presumably you will put your landscape photography into one account and your lifestyle photography into another. In some ways this is good advice. As part of the “Find your tribe” advice, Scott discusses the importance of engaging with others as a way of increasing the engagement of others with you. If you reach out to them, they will reach out to you, as will their followers. It is impossible to please everyone, so find the people you want to follow.
I have some reservations about this approach, but mainly based on time. I find it hard enough to find time to engage on one platform so to have to do so on multiple accounts on multiple platforms fills me with horror. When will I get the time to actually take some photos?
For me, I think the challenge is to find some common ground to the various styles that influence me. I like portrait photography, street photography and I am getting increasingly interested in the storytelling aspect of a single photograph, where perhaps the absence of people is part of the storytelling. There is a storytelling element in portrait photography just as much as in street photography, so that it where my approach in consistency should start from.
Scott also comes up with some interesting thoughts which might at first glance appear to conflict with each other. So, engagement is more about discovering others than yourself. However, he ends the lesson by saying that displaying our photographs reveals something of who we are as people, and our photography gives us the freedom to learn, to find our own voice. It is about us, and our personal journey. I like that. This really is what this blog is all about, at least for me, a learning journey, learning not just for the sake of learning about other things, but about me, and who I am.
Scott’s final thought is to consider what true influence is. It is measured in likes, comments and shares, or is it the ability to inspire change or create change in others. Quite an aspiration and far beyond simply getting a few more likes!
It is a good course, very worthwhile taking, but only if you are going to get out there and take some photos!
