Major promotions are mostly done by your agency. It’s their job to create a strong presence around your unique branding. They have to make sure that the right clients in the industry will see it. Personally, I would rather not sit around and wait for a call. I would rather work on my social media, take a couple of pictures and show the world what I’m capable of. With the right hashtags and interaction with my followers, I’m bound to make a name for myself.
In a previous article called How To Market Yourself In Social Media, we discussed how to curate content that looks visually pleasing to your market. Online presence is very crucial nowadays. In this article, I would like to further discuss why each of these platforms is important in order to boost your modeling career.
The Magic of Instagram
Through the years, Instagram has evolved into a serious search engine for a lot of scouts and clients looking for fresh faces. It lets individuals and businesses expand their brand to a whole new level. It’s a great way to humanize brands, recruit future employees, showcase product and culture, a great way to delight customers because of the straight up visuals. Another important thing to take note is that the more followers you have, the more people you can reach with your posts. Therefore, the more influence you have over the platform. Modeling is all about influencing people and companies find that interesting when they’re looking for a new face for their products.
Here’s a quick break down on how to maximize the use of your Instagram:
- Design a great profile. Provide concise and interesting bio with proper links to your website/portfolio.
- Follow photography and editing best practices. Don’t go overboard with filters that are unflattering. Natural photos with light enhancement and good cropping are usually enough.
- Craft memorable and on-brand captions. It would be great if your captions can encourage followers to interact with one another.
- Use hashtags that are relevant to your niche and audience. Avoid things like #f4f #follow4follow because they look a little desperate.
- Don’t forget to engage with other users and followers.
- Publish Instagram Stories and go live. Live interaction creates a very personal engagement that most people love. Curate interesting segments for your live stream that has something to do with your branding or niche.
The Facebook Fan Page Influence
Just like Instagram, Facebook is also a very crucial platform when it comes to marketing and advertisement for any type of business–this includes your career as a model. By creating a Facebook fan page that is designed to promote your services to the marketplace, you have the option to show that you are a professional that takes his or her craft very seriously. Instagram is personal, a little laid-back, and less professional even though it can showcase a lot of things.
If you’re debating whether to create a fan page or a personal account, here are the things you need to consider:
- The Facebook fan page has an unlimited friend count. It doesn’t cap at 5,000 like personal accounts.
- If you want to keep your personal life private, create a fan page instead. You can keep your personal Facebook account limited only to your friends and family. All you have to do is control the privacy settings of your personal Facebook and put all the promotional content on your fan page. Also, some of your friends and family might not want to be constantly updated with your business concerns.
- Facebook fan pages are indexed. Which basically means that the public content is indexed as well. As your own personal brand (business) you want to show up on the search engines. Personal accounts have the option to not be indexed.
- You want to show up on as many news feeds as possible in order to gain engagement and increase your fan base. Your followers/fans can tag your fan page, while your personal page can mostly tag just your friends and friends of friends.
- Facebook fan pages have analytics that can help you monitor your weekly reach all because of Facebook Insights. You can analyze which posts are the right content for your fans.
- Ads can also be used in order to promote fan pages.
Social Media As A New Layer
Social Media, especially Instagram, allows a client to see another layer of the model; their personality, candid shots with peers, their lifestyle, hobbies and interests, and what they look like on a day to day basis. Portfolios don’t usually show this since most photos that are included there are professionally done. Social media is the personal extension of your portfolio and you have to treat it as one despite the less professional approach.
Ccreate tasteful and strong posts that can reflect your career as a model. Make sure that your personality shines and that your interests are also shown. Try “A day in the life of models” kind of approach. Interests such as fashion, health, wellness, even cooking can be great examples of what your content should contain.
Models with social influence is a very powerful leverage in the industry. If a client is to decide between two models, whoever has the most followers and biggest social media presence gets the job. Models who already have an existing influence in social media would be a great headstart for their brand without a lot of work and this is a big plus.
For those who are new in the industry, building your social media platform is a must. It will take time for you to grow it, but never ever neglect it. Be active and learn new things about improving your social media presence. Feel free to use tools and apps that can help you provide your fans with great content. Other models even use YouTube to document their daily lives as a model and even off-duty!
Tags: facebook, instagram, modeling advice
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