You’ve gone out, bought that equipment, taken that amazing shot and now you want to sell it to people, is Meta a good place to do this?
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The first port of call for most people is their Meta page, unfortunately, in this day and age Meta really isn’t worth using much anymore, particularly pages. In January they updated their algorithyms to show content to less than 1% of users for pages with more than 1,000 likes. That means, for every 1,000 people who have opted to view your page about 10 will see your post organically. You do have the option of paying to promote your post to the other people who have liked your page, unfortunately this is more of con/scam than anything else they have done! Look at the image below, we have 600 ‘likes’ on our Meta page
Out of 600 people, 31 viewed the post (Meta’s definition of a view leaves alot to be desired however), Meta of course, does offer us the chance to show it to more people, $5 for 890 people just to see our post, that’s almost a $6 CPM for people literally just to SEE our post not click on it! For perspective, Clickasnap charges $0.05 everytime someone clicks on your advertisement, that’s not a view of your ad, that’s actually someone seeing your advert and clicking through to it!
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Veritasium actually did a study into Meta ‘likes’ and published a video which ended up going viral because it highlighted how bad the platform has become:
So Meta is out, where else is actually good value? Well, content marketing is certainly becoming incredibly efficient, sites like Taboola and Outbrain offer advertising at a fraction of the cost of Meta and Google and again is on a per click basis, so you aren’t charged just for someone to look at your adverts but actually by an action carried out by your end user target audience. Traditional advertising is certainly coming back in, and banner advertising can be an incredibly cost efficient way of getting your work out to people who want to see it, and of course, once our eCommerce systems come out later this year you will be able to advertise directly on the platform to people who are actively looking for photos to view or buy.
What do you think? What are your experience with Meta pages?
17 Responses
I never thought of facebook as a platform for showing off photography; it is full of images from the internet and personal photos between friends. Many of my close friends and family members are on facebook. I like to share some photos from clickasnap to facebook as this helps keep in touch with them.
Peeve: Lately the option to share from my clickasnap photos is not working with facebook.
Joanne
https://www.clickasnap.com/redheadpei
Hi Joanne, We have just shared a photo with facebook through Clickasnap without any problems. If you continue to have issues please post a thread in the forum about it and we will look into it for you.
As for sharing photos on Facebook regarding this article, it is more orientated to people who use the ‘pages’ function of the site
I have always refrained from creating a ‘FB’ page for photography, the rules consistently keep changing (from what I have read) and having a limited following to begin with could do more than than good. FB may be a platform for photographs along with the social side of sharing that goes with it but advertising images for photographers? I’m in the ‘no’ camp due to algorithms and pure saturation.
I find Facebook useful for directing traffic to ClickASnap rather than to a Facebook Album, where there are no payments and potential copyright issues etc. It works particularly well if you are in an established group with lots of users (in my case a well supported Forest School). However, just yesterday I noticed that the “views” from Facebook didn’t seem to translate into “paid views” like they normally do, and like “ClickASnap views” seem to have done, so I also wondered whether there was some sort of funny business going on with them.
Hi Peter, if you want to confirm click throughs, head to shrunk.co (it’s free to use) and that will tell you how many actual clicks you have had on the link from Facebook
I agree Peter and I do the same thing. I have a personal fb page and a page for my photography which I have only uploaded a few photos to and the rest of the time I only post ClickaSnap links of my photos on my fb page. And now I use the automated upload features for facebook and pinterest which is very handy. Since I already have fb in place I’ll continue using it for now but I won’t pay them a dime for advertising and I do plan to dump them soon. I’ll just use them for whatever I can get. 🙂
Yes, I see others are able to share to facebook. Thanks for your reply.
What an eye-opening article and what a great video link. Once again it’s just smoke and mirrors and somebody, obviously not the photographer is cashing in. Yes I have and even manage several pages to promote my different endeavours and a couple of clients ‘ businesses.
Good part – so far we have tried to build our likes up organically, with people actually having a relationship with the business and /or the fb profile owner. The bad part – it still doesn’t guarantee you engagement and clicks, as there is such a great flood of information, trickling down everybody’s facebook wall. Especially if a post is a bit more demanding (eg not a picture of a cat or dog) and therefore the cuteness factor don’t count – it’s tough out there.
As was mentioned in the video – most interactions/engagements happen with European readers/viewers, who may actually still want to interact.
Just my two cents.
To my knowledge any posts that are now ‘promotional’ are limited even more. The whole sites a waste of money to be honest
I agree I have totally given up on my Facebook oage there’s no point to it anymore. I’ve actually written a blog post about it myself focusing on music and musicians using the same video. Great vid to understand what’s the deal with Facebook!
cheers,
Theo
Would you post the link to your blog post here? We would be interested in reading it
I have a photography page on which I just promote links to here and other sites showing my photographs. I have not really pushed it due to disappointing experiences on my separate business page. A few years ago I did some paid targeted advertising on my business page which increased my likes to over 4000 which seemed reasonable. Then, as stated above, fb unilaterally started to move the goalposts and restricted my pages feed to only a small percentage of those people who had liked my page (unless they opted in which hardly anyone knew about or would want to bother to do)). That seemed grossly unfair as I had effectively paid to acquire those followers. On another occasion fb also notified me that it was culling “inactive” accounts and my likes / following subsequently fell by over 80 people in one day. Next they suggested I spend more to reach more people. The cheek! After sending off a couple of negative feedback form comments to them I lost interest. I felt I had been ripped off after advertising with them.
Join many millions of others i assure you
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