Using Twitter to promote your photos

We have published a fair few articles on promoting your content, and also done several reviews on sites like Meta and explored new promotional sites like Copromote. Quite a few people in the forum on our photo hosting site ClickASnap have asked about promoting their content on Twitter so here is some pointers!

Firstly if you don’t have an account set one up. Twitter, if used correctly, is far more effective than Meta is by orders of magnitude. You need followers to share your content with so go and find Twitter accounts that have similar interests to you. So in our case, we look for photography related twitter accounts. Search through their followers and follow accounts that purport to be about photography, these accounts are 1) the ones that are most likely to follow us back, and 2) these people are likely to engage and be interested in what our tweets say. Building up followers take time and effort, but in the long run it is incredibly valuable.

Only follow those who are relevant and interesting to you on Twitter
Only follow those who are relevant and interesting to you on Twitter

Once you have some followers and content on ClickASnap use a tool like Manageflitter to manage who unfollows you, who you should follow and ultimately grow your following over time. Do not buy followers whatever you do this will screw up your account forever. Growing a following takes time, as does anything worth doing, but once you have those engaged followers you have an audience that you can share your content with anytime you wish to.

Tweeting; this is the crux of it all. Just sharing tweet after tweet of your photos is unlikely to bring much traffic to you. You need to share interesting and valuable information then intersperse this with your photos, and actually, sharing other peoples photos and tweets too. The more generous you are sharing other peoples content, the more likely people are going to share your content.

When tweeting your photos, try and tweet a link directly to your photo. Don’t upload a photo to twitter then paste a link to your profile underneath. This will do nothing as people have already seen all of your content, so why would they click through to your profile?

Don’t over tweet, or do bursts of tweets, spread them out over the day, you can use software like hootsuite to automatically post your content at the times you choose. Or go a step further and use software like Social sprout to automatically analyse you audience and tweet at peak times!

Use a site like bit.ly to track click throughs and optimise your tweets to maximise the traffic you gain from them.

All in all, engage with other users, create conversations. Find one person per day and reply directly to their tweet, if they answer back then work on that and build a relationship. Above all, don’t ram your content down people’s throats, or constantly say ‘come and look at my photo’ because doing this will gert you no where.

We hope you find this useful, if you have any other ideas then pop them in the comments below

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9 Responses

  1. Confused. Don’t directly tweet photographs ? Why do we have a tweet share button on our clickasnap account. Yes its getting confusing this clickasnap. Got to be honest.

  2. It is difficult the conversion clicks in Twitter it is really low. I am trying the aggressive Twitter strategy, but I think that it could be better if my photography work was better, LOL. Maybe a bigger size of the photo in the Twitter link can be a help to a better conversion. For example, Niume Twitter image is really biggest For example https://twitter.com/MicrostockA/status/875578731447803904. What do you think, Tom?
    I use an old Twitter Google spreadsheet that actually it is working. http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot-with-google-spreadsheets-version-04/. I include my new images every day and forgot about it. Well, really I am including in the text the earnings and paid views that I have in each one image, and aleatory I check if any change has happened (more paid views, increase in earnings,…). The web it is inspirational for me, I manage a regional biodiversity web (www.biodiversidade.eu) and think that the people would be happy to generate with their photos and nature observations funds for conservation programs. But, by now we don’t want include Ads on the web, while we are negotiating with administrations that would be financed these conservation programs.
    I get some daily clicks, that I hope that help to get more people using Clickasnap.
    Thanks for your work, Tom.

    1. With Twitter, or in fact any social media 1 click per 100 impressions is considered high. We can increase the image size but this actually decreases click through rates as people have already seen the image full size (most users of twitter are mobile users)

  3. Ok, maybe I try to work in an interesting image description, since the Twitter link include a small fragment, and this text could engage the people. But my english, it is not very good.
    Congrats again for the work.
    Roi.

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