Happy Monday everyone! Quick sneak peek from Emerson and Sutton’s shoot. We had SUCH a blast in downtown and I can’t wait to get the rest of their session published!

Preface: This white paper is a mix between how to get jump-started on using Facebook personally and professionally, as well as some insight on how I manage my Facebook branding and presence. I’ve been using Facebook for over 5 years now, and have been involved with social media since 2003.

It’s important to look at your social media presence, and create and manage goals with them. Just like any other marketing, it is important to set your goals and expectations. What are you expecting from your social media presence? Do you want to manage your connections with colleagues and/or clients? Do you want to generate or increase your referrals from social media? While there are many social media gates such as MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FB, we’ll be focusing solely on Facebook for this article.

Before we look at how you can incorporate your business with Facebook (FB), it is important to look at how we can incorporate YOU personally with Facebook. Facebook is a PERSONAL connection tool. Wedding & Portraiture Photography is a PERSONAL profession. We work with people. Emotions. Moments. It is absolutely imperative that you allow this connection to flow between the two portals! Your clients are purchasing an emotional personal product from you. Therefore it is important to realize that your Facebook presence needs to be built around this idea.

I’ll refer to 4 entities throughout:

Personal – This is you. In real life.
Business – This is your business. In real life.
Personal Facebook Page – this is you. On Facebook. Not your business.
Business Facebook Page – this is your business. On Facebook. Not you.

This white paper is split into the following categories:

1. Establishing Your Personal Page – this includes the mandatory basics of getting the FB snowball rolling.
2. The Balance Between Your Business, And Your Personal Facebook. – this discusses the etiquettes and opinions on how to subtly advertise you’re a SBO and a photographer, without screaming ‘I am desperate and inexperienced at social media!’
3. The Two Most IMPORTANT Reasons You Need To Utilize Your Personal FB. – it is SUCH a great idea on so many different levels and reasons to incorporate your personal FB into your social media model. Here’s why.
4. Creating Your Business Page – and why to use Fan Pages versus Personal Pages.
5. Integrating Photos In a Professional Manner – the subtle and effective way.
6. Including Facebook into your Workflow and Other Medias – this is how you can keep it simple.

Establishing Your Personal Page

You’ll want to have your personal page established. This means… information filled out, profile pictures added, friends added, etc. If you’re new to FB, then take your time adding friends, getting accustomed to the features, etc. I am going to reference this article, because it does a MUCH better job at explaining how to ‘brand’ yourself personally on Facebook. http://mashable.com/2009/04/02/facebook-personal-brand/ . I want expand on the part about ‘Identifying Your Audience.’ Know whom your current and future clients are! My target audience is 17-year-old kids, and 25 to 40+-year-old adults. I have plenty of photographers on my FB page, but they do not bring the dollar bills. My Seniors Market LIVES on social media. (70% of the 2011 Graduating Class in my demographic area are ON Facebook and have listed their High School. What an amazing resource to have available!)

The Balance Between Your Business, And Your Personal Facebook

There is of course no right way to go about this, so I will share some of my own tips and experiences. Right now, I maintain all of my portfolio albums on both my personal page and fan page. Facebook is photo ORIENTED and I am taking full advantage of this. I don’t really market my services via status updates. Most people I am FB friends with know I am a photographer. My status updates include lots of work related things… because, well, I work a lot! They are also REAL. I’m an extremely optimistic person. We all have ups and downs… but please don’t be a downer all the time. It’s not attractive to anyone! This is true for any web/blog/social media presence. A great quote: “Never tell your problems to anyone…80% don’t care and the other 20% are glad you have them.”

There is this constant fear from photographers that it’s the end of the world if you link your business to your personal page. I’ve seen statements such as ‘I don’t want ANY of my clients to see my personal page.’ Or ‘my private life is for me and my friends only.’ Unless you’re selling drugs on Facebook, your life isn’t that secretive. Your personal Facebook is like… the behind the scenes from a DVD. People LOVE knowing how something works. And that includes you! You will get friend requests from clients on your personal profile. These are GREAT contacts. A Facebook friend request is like a handshake in real life. When someone extends their hand out, how do you respond?

The Two Most IMPORTANT Reasons You Need To Utilize Your Personal FB.

You must be PERSONAL FB friends in order to tag ANYONE on your Business FB page. Reread that three times. You must be personal FB friends with a client to SEE their full profile. (Pending privacy settings, but the stats at this point have more private profiles then publically available ones.) When you are friends with a client, you have access to any info they have available – music, TV shoes, about me, etc. This is USEFUL information!

Creating Your Business Page

Why you DON’T use a personal page strictly for your business:

• You’re limited to 5,000 friends.
• It’s against Facebook TOS.
• You get statistics/analytics with the business page.
• It looks unprofessional. EXTREMELY unprofessional. When a company creates a personal page for Facebook, it translates to ‘I can’t read and comprehend basic directions.’

There are VERY few differences between a personal page and a fan page logistically speaking. Major points: A fan page can NOT write on a fan’s wall. And a fan page can’t tag fans. It’s simple! There’s NO reason not to use a Fan Page instead. To create your business page, you login to your PERSONAL account and go here: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages . A GREAT article on creating your Fan Page is here: http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/ . If you have a strong personal Facebook personal presence, it’ll be easy to build your initial fan base. Sending A Request To Join Your Fan Page. It’s acceptable to do this when you first create the page – make a nice little status update about it, turn it into a little grand opening, etc. Beyond that, do not send requests once a day. Or week. Or month. It’s considered extremely tacky and desperate.

Integrating Photos In a Professional Manner

Why Tagging Rocks, and How To Do it! By now, you know what the News Feed is. Here’s why tagging rocks:

• When you tag someone in a photo, video, status update, or note, it goes STRAIGHT to your News Feed, and ALSO theirs.
• When you tag them, it goes STRAIGHT to their wall. Any friend who looks on their wall, or has the tagged person in their News Feed… they see this!
• When you tag that person and the link is clicked on, it goes to YOUR profile or fan page.

The second, and nearly as important option: you need to provide your clients with FB photos via download or email. These should be appropriately and elegantly watermarked with your logo/website. And here’s why: people love to create albums with their pictures. When your client gets to make their OWN album, it allows their friends to comment on them. A quick asterisk – I find that uploading the images on MY pages first works better. Here’s why: it’s the first time the client and their friends have seen the images on FB, so it moves more traffic to me. Usually 24-72 hours after, I email their FB version for them to create. Depending on how many friends they have, how active they are on FB, etc. I can expect to get 3-5 friend requests from their friends, and 3-5 new fans on my page (usually not the same people either).

Including Facebook Into Your Workflow and Other Medias.

Blog? If you have a blog, then you’ll want to peep the ‘Notes’ Feature on your Business Fan Page. It will automatically import your blog posts for you. It’s seamless, it’s simple, and it’s automated.

Twitter? You can have Facebook update your Twitter status, and vice versa using various applications provided by third party Twitter and Facebook applications.

Facebook is a very resilient tool that can do a great job of increasing your brand awareness when used correctly. Further more, Facebook is experiencing rapid amounts of changes in a short timeframe. There are constantly new features being deployed, so it is important to revisit your marketing goals and strategies with Facebook often. What worked even 6 months can be considered obsolete and ineffective today. Facebook is similar to your SEO work… it takes work and effort every single day to make it a successful part of your business. If you have any questions, I am more than happy to do my best to answer them in a public manner. No PM’s or emails please.

Mario Masitti

http://www.mariomasitti.com
http://www.facebook.com/mariomasitti (Personal)
http://www.facebook.com/mariomasittistudios (Fan Page)
http://www.twitter.com/mariomasitti (Twitter)

You can download this post in PDF form here .

For the past 12 months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some outstanding businesses while I’ve grown my studio and portrait work.

The first company is Identity Kitchen. Words can’t express how important your brand is, and Ellen hit it out of the ballpark with Mario Masitti Studios. You can read the entire case study and testimonial HERE, but definitely check out the rest of her portfolio – it’s breathtaking!

The second company is ProDPI. PDPI is a day to day example on how great customer service can make or break a company. I am extremely flattered to be a featured photographer on ProDPI, and you can read the interview HERE !

And finally, a sneak peek from Deanna’s session… full shoot coming soon.

I’m not the most articulate person around… but let’s just say I could write a book about how awesome Malorie is. She is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met, and her energy and enthusiasm for life is unmatched. I had the opportunity to photograph some updated headshots for her and couldn’t have asked for better outfits, better weather, and an overall better shoot! I hope you enjoy as much as I do. Cheers!

PS… her glasses totally snapped at the session… being as awesome as she is, we had a second pair on hand. Love it!

Make-Up provided by the amazing Danica Jardien from Make-Up Envy

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Yay for the New Year!!! I had the opportunity to photograph Alli and Davis a little while ago, so I apologize for the blog posts being a little slow! Alli is so intelligent, friendly, and was FULL of energy… and Davis! Even only at 15 months, had SO much personality and expression… photographing them was a blast. I love having the opportunity to photograph at my client’s homes… and while it was FREEZING cold outside, we managed to get the kids outside for a couple minutes and build a great variety of images. Hope you enjoy, and I have a couple more kids shoots I’ll be blogging soon!

If there is one thing I can say about my studio, is there is a never a dull moment about how I meet a client. I went to middle school with Shelby’s sister a VERY long time ago. Thanks to Facebook, Shelby’s sister saw my work and the rest is history! Shelby looks JUST like her sister… I almost mistaken her the first time we met! Soon before our shoot, I received a dreaded email that Shelby broke her arm! We managed to squeeze in a quick studio session to get her yearbook photo taken, and we rescheduled the fun part of the shoot after. Despite the chilly weather, and snow remaining on the ground, we got some GREAT colorful images. Hope you enjoy, and thank you Shelby and your family for such an amazing time!

Michaela does hair. And she is awesome at it. Anyone who knows me and my obsession with hair will know why I appreciate Michaela. She also goes to CU, so needless to say I was lucky to squeeze an afternoon in for a shoot. We took advantage of a GORGEOUS 60*+ day in November which is just so rare considering this winter is supposed to be really harsh. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do is to really incorporate a bunch of different styles into one combined shoot – most of this being different lighting, but also posing, outfits, processing, and the overall ‘feel’ of what’s going on. So for you photographer geeks, you’ll notice I am using natural light, reflectors, and also Speedlites throughout the shoot to accomplish a certain mood. I hope you guys enjoy, and thanks Michaela for being an AWESOME model for the day!

Hi there everyone! With the return of my hand feeling better, I am extending a very very select offer to my clients. I am doing exactly 10 in-studio family sessions the third week of November (yes, that is three weeks away!), and I have a couple spots left. If you and your family is interested, give me a call or send me an email SOON (and I mean soon )! I’ll get information sent to you right away. Thank you guys, and hope you’re enjoying some gorgeous Colorado weather!

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Hey there everyone, sorry for my absence lately.. I did a pretty good number on my trigger finger. It’s been casted for the last week, and I’ve been doing some rehabilitation and physical therapy to help the healing process. I want to thank all of my awesome clients who were so understanding on rescheduling their shoots. And I want to thank my readers for being patient! I’ll be having some new content up within the next couple weeks. Not only that, but be prepared for some Halloween awesomeness. My costume this year is the bomb!

Dayna and I jumped in the studio up in Denver real quick just to play around with some new lighting ideas I had. We had an awesome time, and got some great keepers as well!