Do Photographers Truly Need a Website in the Age of Social Media?
Image by: @johnishappysometimes
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In a time where photographers seem to be struggling for bookings, the lack of a website, in my opinion, creates more struggle to be discovered and booked. Especially if you are new and haven’t built up other avenues such as a following of loyal clients who are advocates, or having an established brand and reputation in your field of expertise. The goal when new is to be discovered by your ideal client, and so we want to create as many opportunities as possible to be found.
If you currently only have a presence on a social media platform, you have to consider an important question beyond the time, effort or money to get a website going:
Will only having a social media site help or hinder my ability to advance my business?
Social media platforms are someone else's brand, and you are renting a cubicle. You are bound by their rules, their look and feel. They are designed for “scroll and forget”, offer tiny boxes for content and have distractions everywhere. You have very little control over how a client experiences your brand when it's embedded into and overshadowed by someone else's.
The pitfalls of only having a social media presence
In a social media platform, the owners control all aspects - how you can post, how much you can post (character limitations), what your business looks and feels like (which is a standardized template so you look like everyone else). That’s giving a lot of power away in your ability to engage with your audience. And if the platform disappears, you do too. Your website has more stability and sustainability and to be honest, people try to save a few bucks but that cost is very small relative to even one lens.
Credibility: Trust, credibility and reputation all matter in an industry such as ours. Clients interact directly with the business owner (us) and we are mostly a business of one. This means that people’s perceptions of the business falls squarely on our shoulders. If we decided to be a lawyer, we would probably want to have an professional office, display our credentials, and have clear policies because these are all cues that project stability and trustworthiness. What if you came across a lawyer operating out of their briefcase in a co-working space with blank walls and no credentials in sight and asks only for a handshake? You have to ask yourself if social media is sufficient to communicate trust and credibility so that someone would feel comfortable in handing over lots of money to you.
You have to operate within their rules. If you contravene the rules or someone reports you, you can get shadow banned or worse, your accounts can be suspended or permanently disabled. Each moment of downtime represents potential loss of business for you, and magnified if it’s your only presence and can’t rely on any backup way of people to find you. On top of that, you have to spend time trying to get them re-activated (which isn’t easy because they platforms make it difficult to get customer support.) That’s additional time you could have spent finding more clients and even if your account is reinstated, often you must rebuild the presence and following.
Their brand gets priority over yours and they will place their business interests over yours every.single.time. How many complain about changing algorithms and monetization of previously free features? They provide enough to keep you there because that’s what benefits them; it’s their business, after all, and rightly so that they look out for their interests. It’s just that their interests aren’t yours, so you get the short end of the stick. Which is fine because we can leverage what they do provide to our best advantage, but without being reliant on them for our whole online existence. They will show your work less if it doesn't suit their algorithm, allow very little customization, compress your images. They encourage people to click elsewhere with distractions because they want to advance their business, not yours.
When you are just starting and wanting to get a name out, social media forces aren't working with you - it's like swimming against the current for all the reasons stated above. You spend a lot of time trying to look good within their limits. And let’s not forget the photographer’s anthem: “My market is saturated! How do I compete in a saturated market?” The answer, don’t only have Facebook and IG. Because we feel scarce of money and scared to invest in a fledgling business, we avoid the time, effort and possibly monetary investment in a website and start with an FB business page. But guess what? So does every other photographer starting out in your area. We want to be unique but then do exactly as all the others do, rendering us the same, and lost in a super-crowded space with little to work with to stand out.
The benefits of having a website for your photography business
Control over your brand experience
A website provides near limitless ways to design the experience you want clients to have. Yes, there are also standardized templates offered with web providers, but you have so many ways to customize a template that you can still make it look extremely different from anyone else also using the same template. You can also hire someone to design something completely from scratch and sky is pretty much the limit.
You can add large images, text, bring in product features, sprinkle about testimonials, create sections and headlines for emphasis. You can change fonts, font sizes, page formats. You can customize colours for just about every aspect with your brand colours. You can lead clients through the website strategically using links and buttons.
The choices you make create a journey for client’s landing into your space. It’s like they walk through the door of your home, and all the design and decor was what you chose, not Mark Zuckerberg! All of these elements reinforce your brand: messaging and aesthetic experience.
Ability to add features that help you be discovered
Product/ service and sales pages: Most website providers give you the ability to add up to a few hundred pages on your site (and maybe more with a plan upgrade) - much more robust than a scroll on socials! You can add many different pages to highlight a particular service or product. Sales pages are terrific for elaborating on a special event that led someone there from a social media ad or post. Bonus you can measure activity on these pages to see how successful your ad campaigns were in generating traffic and interest. Measurement is important feedback for us to tailor our strategies for optimized conversions and bookings.
Marketing features: Most website providers add elements that aid in marketing. For example Squarespace (that ShinesSparkL is hosted on) has a promotional banner feature where I can create a call out for something special on the website; great for specific campaigns, or seasonal offers. It also provides a pop up and a newsletter block where I can create lead magnets and gather emails to add people to an email list (which may be how you got to this blog post - my email is setup to send every time a new blog post is published). This is huge. Many social media users remain anonymous to us and may never interact with our business page’s post. Conversely, if someone provides an email, they went from anonymous stranger to warm lead.
SEO: This is the practice of optimizing your site’s pages to be indexed by the largest search engine: Google. The bonus over media? Google may serve up your facebook page if the right combo of search terms was used, but imagine you had 20 website pages and 50 blog posts. It’s like the lottery. Buy one ticket and get a chance to win. Buy more tickets, more chances to win! More content means more opportunity for your content to be served up to people by Google.
Evergreen content: On media, it’s the scroll and forget. If someone fell upon a post and then got distracted and taken away somewhere else, do they think they might find you again if they wanted to see your content again? On your website you can create blogs that are discoverable even years later by someone using the right keywords again. And they can contain valuable and relevant content years later, such as advice on planning weddings. Your content keeps working for you multiple times even though you wrote it only once.
Undivided attention: Years ago I signed my daughter up for swimming. I went with individual lessons over a group program. This was intentional because the gains she could make in an hour individually with undivided attention trumped the diluted attention and time in the pool she would have in a group, and make her gains slower. Social media is the diluted group program where people’s attention is divided. If someone has landed on your webiste then there is nothing but you and your messaging and your imagery there, with no competitor in sight! Greater gains.
You can have a free website up in minutes with certain providers, so the money argument is moot. For the free site you may have to suffer with some banners of the provider or their name in the domain if you don’t have the funds to buy a domain, but it’s still better because you can still access the benefits of having a website. Then, when you have time and maybe more money, you can improve and upgrade.
But let’s not forget social media altogether - it can have an important role
Social media, for all its drawbacks, shouldn’t be completely disregarded. The drawbacks are mainly in relying on it as your business home. But if you have your home set up in the form of a website, then social media platforms are the roads that lead everyone home. These platforms amplify your footprint online, to increase the territory of discoverability. The key is to leverage them to our advantage. Instead of trying to fit an entire mini campaign into FB boxes, create an ad that leads to a sales page and has a booking link. When you post in groups, share a relevant blog post that gets people the site where they are asked for an email or share a particular niche that you offer and lead them directly to that section for specific information.
I know there is some debate on this topic. There are some who are doing just fine with only a business profile on FB and there are others who want to kick social media to the curb because they find it toxic and want to know if they can operate with just a website. With my marketing experience, my opinion is really that both have their role. It’s only when we try to have social media play the role of website where we may run up against a wall, due to its limitations and lack of control. What’s your take?
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