How I’m Using Instagram as a Fashion Photographer (2021)
It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about Instagram, and honestly, a lot has changed. Instagram is still the most heavily used social media platform by most people in the fashion industry. Most people in the world. I’ve changed how I use Instagram recently, so it felt important to create a new blog post explaining how I use the app myself.
Keep Ideal Clients In Mind:
Knowing who your ideal client is the foundation of every business. It’s the most important exercise to do before you do anything else. After all, if you don’t know who you’re speaking to, how can you market yourself to those people? I’m constantly going back to basics with this, and I try to do “ideal client” exercises every 6 months or so. It’s critical to me that I check in with myself, and take a step back - am I steering my business in the way that I want it to go? Am I creating the right kind of content for the right people?
At the end of 2020, it began to become clearer and clearer to me that I was trying to speak to too many people on my Instagram profile @oliviabossert. The focus of the account was muddied by the fact that I was using it to promote my work as a photographer, as well as my work as an educator. I knew deep down that I needed to create a new account, but I resisted it for a long time. I wasn’t following my own advice!
Eventually though, I did, and oh my goodness I wish I’d done is sooner. Now my profile @oliviabossert needs to do one thing: share the work that I create with my potential clients. That’s it. Having that very clear focus makes it so much easier for me to know what to post and what not to post.
If you haven’t done any “ideal client” work in a long time, I’d highly recommend that you spend some time doing so.
This article is a great place to start!
Quality Over Quantity
Back in the day, the advice with Instagram used to be post as much as you can, as often as you can. Then, when the algorithm came into play, that advice changed. The algorithm has been around for a while now, and there are SO many other features to use on Instagram these days that posting to your grid, and not doing anything else seems a bit one-sided. Instead of trying to post as much as I can, these days I post to my grid much less. Sometimes only once or twice a week!
It’s all about posting quality work, and not quantity. We need to remind ourselves that we really should only be posting our very best images. You never know who might be watching! When I have new work out that I want to share, I’ll spread that out over a couple of weeks. If I’m in a period where not much work is out for publication yet (like I have been in all of 2021 so far!), I’ll dig into my archives, but even then, I hardly post.
In my mind, it would be better to post once a week and keep things looking really beautiful and curated, than posting often and hoping to get seen that way. Quality will always trump quantity.
Archiving Posts
Some of you know that I archived about 90% of my posts on my account a few weeks ago. It was a long, and strenuous activity (literally hours of sitting on the sofa with the TV on, clicking and archiving each and every post individually).
I had almost 4000 posts on my grid (I’ve been on Instagram since 2011). So why did I bother? Isn’t that a massive waste of my time?
The reality is that most of the images on my account were really, really, old. They were a bad representation of my skills as a photographer - and I didn’t want potential clients to see those images. The catalyst for me was when I was listening to a producer on a podcast say that if she scrolled through a photographers Instagram, and saw images that she didn’t like, it was likely that it would put her off working with that person.
Obviously, that is one person, and opinions on this will vary widely, but to me, it felt like the right thing to do.
I wanted a clean slate. A chance to be at the top of my game, and move beyond the “little girl” I once was. I love all of that old work - it’s what got me to where I am today! But it doesn’t need to be public anymore. It can be for me to enjoy.
Captions
I got an email the other day from someone expressing confusion over captions, and how they should be written. She said that she had noticed that most “big photographers” tended to keep captions very short and sweet, which seemed to go against most advice on Instagram about writing loads in your captions. Advice that I myself used to give, I might add.
She also noticed that my own captions had changed and that I was no longer writing as much as I once used to. And she’s right - I have changed the way that I write my captions.
These days, I’m keeping my captions fairly short. Sometimes I only credit the people involved and let the image speak for itself. But that isn’t always the case. If I feel like an image has a story to tell, or I have something that I want to share alongside it, I will absolutely write a caption with more detailed information. I simply ask myself: “What feels necessary to share right now?”
I have a lot of new work coming out in the next few months, some of which have HUGE amounts of information behind them about how the story came to me, what the day was like, little anecdotes from the shoot days themselves, and I’ll be sharing those.
What I won’t be doing is “educating” my clients. I’m no longer trying to work with small businesses - I want to work as much as possible with bigger brands. These big brands don’t need educating. They know how the industry works. They know the value of photography. It would be patronising of me to try to teach them “why photography is worth investing in.” Instead, they’re more interested in reading stories about the shoots, knowing who I worked with, and who the images were produced for.
As always, I’m learning as I go. I don’t have the definitive answers on this, and I’m not saying that you should now start to only share the team credits in your captions and that’s it. Do whatever works for you, and feels right to you! If you enjoy writing long captions, do it. If, like me, you actually find it quite difficult and exhausting, don’t worry about it.
Stories
Instagram Stories are the place where I feel freer to post. I use my stories to share my day to day life - a behind the scenes look at what it’s like working with me, what I’m like on shoots and the kinds of places I go. I also love to share things that inspire me, books I’m reading, my outfits, and other parts of me that make me who I am. My account is, after all, about my work, but my work tends to be a reflection of me, and I do still believe that customers want to know who the person behind the lens is.
Reels
Instagram Reels is obviously the big, fancy new feature that is getting all the attention at the moment. It’s definitely being boosted by Instagram, and people are definitely engaging with it! I’m still working out how to use Reels on my account in a way that will work for me, but for now, it tends to become somewhere I share behind the scenes of shoot days. I love that I can make little videos with music that will last a long time, and showcase my work.
Overall, I want my Instagram profile to be a place where an ideal client can come and get to know me really well. I want there to be things to see, ways to explore my work, and then make a better decision about whether they want to hire me.
I’m always learning and will continue to share what I learn with you over at @oliviabosserteducation. So come and follow me there if you aren’t already!
