How specialist stock photo agencies can do more with social media

A review of our latest webinar on leveraging social media for business development.

Neal Romanek led Pepper Stark's latest webinar on leveraging social media for business development. This seminar focused on the smaller or specialist stock agency looking to social media to help grow their brand awareness and increase business and was based around three case studies of stock photo agencies / photographers who were using social media effectively to engage with their stakeholders and customers and thus develop business.

There are so many social media sites around and each could be explored for its potential as a business development tool but in this seminar we focused specifically at the use of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging and touched on LinkedIn and Flickr. One of the key elements I took from this was focusing on quality not quantity and just to throw yourself into it. Hardly rocket science as they say, but sometimes you need someone to tell you some basics to kick you into action, that you probably knew already!

If you have a specialist stock agency and you don’t have bags of time to devote to social media, then you can still be effective leveraging these media by focusing on the following:

• Research and decide which social networking sites are best for you
• Where are your competitors and customers?
• Ensure your social media links are easy to find on your homepage
• Choose strategically who to follow on Twitter and Facebook; follow people you want to be communicating and doing business with
• Have a personal voice in your social media activities
• Although with Twitter you can broadcast messages to the masses, you can also have individual conversations with people and actively seek to do this
• Facebook is much more about engaging a community in your brand; the more interactive the engagement the better
• Post items and information that could be of interest to those in your business sector and wider interest community; show them your area of expertise

It’s easy to think you could do something wrong or badly. That seems unlikely. The greatest danger with social media I would say is that you devote more time to it than beneficial within the overall marketing mix. Just ensure that the objectives and activities are allocated within the marketing plan, therefore the ROI is measurable.

Ultimately you need to enjoy interacting via social media. If it isn’t for you, entrust a member of your team for whom it is exciting and keep following others, seeing what they do well, how you can improve your social media communications and keep abreast of the new sites that come up. What will be the next big site to rival Twitter or Facebook in the business realm? It’s always easier for those coming to it first to be those that get the biggest following and always that bit harder for late comers to make their presence felt.

For more information on leveraging social media for business development, please contact Liz.Pepper(at)pepperstark.com; tel : + 44 (0) 20 7470 8770.