How to Avoid the Looming Facebook BLACKOUT! [with Phillip Blume]

Want more information on this article? Watch the related video below. Or to view the published version of this article and others written by top photographers, subscribe and view the December 2017 issue of Shutter Magazine, the industry’s leading professional photography magazine available online and at Barnes & Noble booksellers everywhere.

UPDATE:
Mark Zuckerberg today (January 11, 2018) officially announced Facebook’s plan to roll out changes to its newsfeed and business Pages, which we predicted last year in our article below (originally published in Shutter Magazine). Read the New York Times and CNet coverage of the announcement today.

We’re honored to keep you informed about trends that affect photographers — and more importantly, techniques that allow you to succeed in any environment!

We hope the below tips help you navigate the new marketing environment on social media! As always, there’s more to come. Stay connected with us and our entire ComeUnity for photographers right here!
– The Blumes 

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When I joined “The Facebook” in 2004, it was still targeted at students on just a handful of college campuses. By the time my wife and I (the Blumes) established Blume Photography in 2008, the social site, re-branded as Facebook, began developing Pages for business. Small businesses (especially work-from-home photographers) were over the moon! The bright promise of a new tech age (with free advertising!) had dawned.

We should have known better!

As Milton Friedman pointed out a century ago, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Now Facebook is reaffirming the prominent economist’s theory with a new pay to play policy that’s sending shock waves through many industries — including ours.

This month, Facebook is testing a plan to move all non-paid Page posts away from the newsfeed! The Guardian online reported that tests by Facebook (in six countries outside the U.S.) caused a devastating 60-80% fall in user engagement on business Pages. The tech news site Medium described the change as “death to small businesses.” It certainly might be.. if you don’t know how to adapt.

Here’s everything you need to know to avoid the impending blackout before it hits your business.

1. Branch out to New Social Platforms

Unfortunately, the information in this article has nothing to do with loopholes or “hacking Facebook.” If that’s what you’re hoping, you have the wrong mindset altogether! Besides, advice like that would probably be outdated by the time this article hits newsstands, since Facebook and other companies are constantly making changes and clamping down on workarounds. That’s the whole point!

For example, you technically could set up your business as a “Personal Profile.” We have colleagues who’ve tried this even in the past. But it goes against the site’s terms of service, meaning we’ve seen profiles like that (and all the content on them) get shut down. Even if it escapes Big Brother’s watchful eye, though, a personal profile won’t provide you the few useful tools that actually are being developed for businesses.

My advice: Play by the rules, but think outside the box!

You can “share” posts from your business Page via your personal Facebook profile. But do so with care. Though Facebook allows it, sharing too much can fatigue your friends. (Just think how many of your friends’ profiles you “muted” when they became Essential Oils sales channels, right?) Still, this might be the only way you’ll be able to make posts show up in a newsfeed at all now. (Speculation is that even personal “tagging” won’t work, which has been the best way for photographers to organically spread Page posts up to now.)

I’ll touch on worthwhile paid advertising ideas in a moment. But for now, just remember that Facebook’s new hardline policies don’t seem to apply to Instagram, which it also owns. So make sure you’re on Instagram! It’s an amazing platform, and upcoming generations are using it more heavily than Facebook anyway, which now caters to an older demographic.

Even without your own Instagram account, you can create and run Instagram ads from your Facebook business account. So it may be worth something after all!

2. Take Control of Your Website

It’s not about the Page. Remember when business Pages were new? Your marketing posts reached your “fans” organically. You appeared in the newsfeed right alongside friends’ selfies and artfully captured lattes. It made sense. Those people “liked” your Page because they wanted to hear from you, right? But giving away free access to the world’s most powerful advertising platform was never Facebook’s endgame.

The question is, have you pinned too much of your marketing strategy (and your survival) on the empty hope social sites won’t change? With the birth of Pages, my wife Eileen and I saw waves of photographers enter the online space for the first time. We heard chatter from countless newbies about “efficient” new businesses they’d started with “zero entry cost.” They were not interested in “wasting time” on SEO. Many even swore off personal Websites, with their “unfair” hosting and design expenses.

Never build a business on that kind of risk! As a business owner, you need to actually own the most foundational parts of your business.

No matter what changes with social media, your online face will remain under your control. But what good is that face if it’s hard to find? Next, let’s focus on making our sites just as magnetic as social media’s “good ol’ days.”

3. SEO Is Not a Four-Letter Word

To make your site megnetic, it needs strong SEO. There are libraries of books written on the topic, and I didn’t write any of them. I’m not a tech wizard. But I do practice the basic SEO “hygiene” any photographer can do. It makes a real difference.

First, invest in a reputable Website design and host. Make sure both are optimized for modern SEO — the behind-the-scenes coding that Google cares about but makes my brain feel squishy. A lot of photographers still use WordPress blog sites, as we did for the last seven years. WordPress has lots of functionality and good SEO potential. But it isn’t designed specifically for photographers, and even pricier WordPress design templates aren’t as beautiful or original as we’d like.

We finally moved our site to the the new Showit5 platform last month! Though we looked at other easy drag-and-drop site builders like Wix and SquareSpace, their templates were just too rigid compared to Showit’s fluid interface, which is built with creativity in mind just for photographers and artists. Not only is Showit on the cutting edge of html5 and SEO integration, but they also host our site. So we dropped our Web hosting subscription and saved on design by easily customizing our own Website with no coding involved. Now we are finally standing out on mobile, too (where 60% of Web traffic travels).

Next, make it a habit to rename your photos for keyword searches. Web crawlers weigh images heavily, but only if they’re

descriptive. When exporting images to your blog, you can create a Lightroom pre-set to default to a filename like “best athens ga wedding photographer,” which I use and tweak as needed. From there, if you use a popular rapid-blogging tool like BlogStomp, also be sure to go into its Settings and de-select any file re-naming defaults that will undo all your hard work. Then you’re able to post the same images to your Facebook Page without actually going online — they may never show in the newsfeed, but at least Google has a chance to find them.

Another pro tip: Use original descriptive blog post titles (especially avoiding repetitious phrases here, which earn penalties).

To go really deep on SEO for photographers, I highly recommend www.fuelyourphotos.com. The articles are smart and accessible — even for a novice like me!

4. Blog Right!

Great. You have a gorgeous SEO-optimized Website. Now use it more strategically. For one, that means blogging better. Ouch!! I know, most of us aren’t writers, right? But don’t let this weigh you down.

We keep blogging simple and effective by remembering the 80/20 Rule. Eighty percent of our good results come from just 20 percent of the work most people do. So why not focus all your effort on just the things that work?! When our clients book a wedding or portrait session, they receive a survey from us along with their contract. It asks them about their love story, to describe their family, where they work and what hobbies they have.

Now instead of grappling with writer’s block every time I have to pen an un-original wedding blog, I just copy-and-paste the text my clients wrote for me into each blog! Their friends are much more interested in reading the juicy details of

real-life stories than they are about my useless descriptions of “beautiful” photo shoots and “cutest couples ever.”

Our survey also asks wedding couples for their vendors’ websites. So we can paste the full list plus backlinks into each post with minimal effort on our part. Great for both SEO and vendor relationships!

5. Advertise Strategically

It may hurt to say so, but planning a Facebook advertising budget may be a wise idea for your studio now. Truth be told, I’m optimistic about the potential changes to Facebook. It’s hard to appreciate the impact that Facebook has had on our industry over the last few years. I believe it is even more responsible than the digital photography revolution for the influx of inexperienced photographers in our markets today.

In short, Facebook gives you unprecedented demographic information and access to audiences built just by you. It is crazy cool.. and even creepy on an Orwellian scale. Believe me, it’s worth the money. Just don’t squander your budget.

To make your dollars go farther…

remember one thing: small photo businesses have to advertise differently than commodity retailers. “Brand awareness” is less important than “brand trust.” Sound confusing? It’s not. It simply means that billboards and omni-present logos might matter to brands like Coca-Cola, but they won’t help you. An ad alone isn’t enough. You need to link your ad to a specific landing page that helps guide every interested onlooker to book you immediately for the one particular service marketed in your ad! Software like StickyFolios not only helps you to do this economically, but also is user-friendly and offers education to make the strategy of it all make sense.

6. Embrace change

As Facebook’s changes become reality, it will only become more difficult for low-budget, part-time photographers — anyone who can’t afford to advertising — to compete. Does that encourage you? Or does it scare you?

If you’re a young-and-upcoming photographer, it probably scares you. But it shouldn’t.

Listen! This is going to help you in the long run. Eileen and I have succeeded as full-time photographers in this industry for nearly a decade. We’ve watched throngs of photographers use their millennial tech know-how to build businesses fast; then we’ve watched almost 80 percent of them fail in less than five years.

Yes, Facebook’s changes might force you to focus on time-tested business strategies, real-life networking, and building mentor relationships. But that’s good! Those are the tools that made us a “fastest growing business” and helped create every thriving friend we have in this industry.

If you’re ready to put on your big-boy or big-girl pants and get involved in that kind of process, we invite you to join our community for photographers at www.theblumes.co any time!

For now, don’t panic! This is not the end for you. A new year is coming. This is only the beginning.

We’d love to know your questions and thoughts on this topic. Comment below, and let’s discuss it!