That’s a good question, but to tell you the truth, I haven’t come to a real conclusion on that yet… On the one hand, it’s all the rage and you’re just not considered “hip” unless you tweet. On the other, I just don’t know if it’s really that useful, from a promotional point of view. The same thing could be said of photo-blogging, but at least with blogging, there’s the ability to show your pictures. With twitter though, there are no pictures to show-off your work. Not being able to display your photography is a real negative for a professional photographer’s promotional needs, but there are some advantages, to go along with all the disadvantages.

As I see it, here are the advantages of disadvantages of twitter for professional photographers. I’d be interested in your opinions.

Advantages of twitter:

Reading tweets – Gain information about your clients – If you choose to follow your clients or perspective clients, there are things you can learn that you can use in your relationship with them or in your marketing efforts. You can learn about new clients, new employees, awards that the client has received, and many other things that may come in useful to help develop a relationship that might in time, be to your advantage.

Reading tweets – Grow as a photographer – If you choose to follow people in the photography industry, you may learn about new techniques or trends that may affect you or your photography. It’s good to keep up on that stuff.

Writing tweets – Spread info about your work – The old saying, “out of sight, out of mind” may come into play here. It works on the same principle as keeping in touch my email. It’s soft sale. You’re hoping that all those little tweets will happen to remind a client that you’re still alive and that you still do some damn good photography and there might be a time when a project lands on the client’s desk just as you’ve bragged about doing such a good job on another project. Bingo… Maybe that client should give you a call! Being at the right time at the right place, is a major advantage of tweeting.

Writing tweets – Directing clients to your web page – In my opinion, my main objective in tweeting is to get clients and potential clients to my web page. The key is to figure out how to guide the right people to the site so that they can see how wonderful a photographer I am. Tweeting is one more way to get that to happen.

Writing tweets – Developing a relationship with clients – After you’ve read your clients’ tweets, you have an opportunity to act or respond to those tweets in a way that helps you develop a relationship with those clients. You can make friends through twitter and people tend to like working with their friends.

Writing tweets – You look “hip” – Okay, I guess using the word “hip” illustrates that I’m not… but to appear so, I tweet, therefore, I am. (or at least I hope people think so… :+)

Disadvantages of twitter:

Time! It takes time to find people to follow and it takes time to read and write the tweets. It takes time to do all that stuff and it might be better spent doing other things like shooting for your portfolio or taking your portfolio from client to client, attempting to get more work.

For me, the verdict is still out. I’m not sure that tweeting makes sense for my commercial photography business, but for now, I’ll give it a chance. I’m willing to dedicate some time to it, but I’m not really sure if it’s worth the effort. So as long as I have the time to experiment with tweeting, I’ll continue to give it a try and don’t worry, I’ll report back to you. And besides, I really like being “hip”. :+)

Here are some follow up images from my last food post. Here’s the retouched / composite shot and also a copy of the original layout. I think it’s valuable for wanna-be professional photographer to see the whole story from beginning to end. (The middle is a post or two back…)

This is what I’ve been doing the last couple of days (mostly)

http://www.foodportfolio.com/e/pages/MichaelRay3_09.html

I had a couple of small projects come in over the last couple of days, but for the most part, I’ve been working on an email promotion. Yes, some may call it spam, just as all those postcards in your mailbox are considered “junk mail”, but if you’re going to be a professional photographer, you need to promote yourself and email promotions are effective and have a great ROI.

So what do you think?

I tried to make it more personal than just an ad, and a few people (in forums where I gave it a preview) stated that they didn’t care for the approach. Obviously, I liked it…

I know… This subject really isn’t about food photography, but it is a bout professional photography. If you’re not interested in marketing, you won’t survive as an independent professional photographer. I’d put money on it, no matter how good you are.

Here’s the way this works… I design this emaier in web page software (I currently use Go-Live,but will need to learn Dreamweaver soon) and then copy the html from the page into my “spamming” email software. In order to embed an images in the email, without having it be an attachment, you need to have the image or images on a server software and put the URL of that image into the html of the emailer. That way, the images shows up, but not as an attachment.

I got about 80 positive responses from my email blast. I’m not sure how many images were opened, but these types of promotions tend to work over time. Someone may have opened the email, liked it, went to my site, bookmarked it, but didn’t contact me. And then, when the right job shows up on their desk, they’ll contact me. As least that’s how I hope it happens. :+)

TTFN!