Use of Social Media
No doubt, nearly anyone who spends some amount of time on the Internet, has had at least some contact with social media sites if they do not have their own presence on line. Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and so on seems to fill our days with posts both profound and mundane. Of course, the explosion of usage has come hand in hand with the near ubituquos use of smartphones and their ever present camera. Now it is not enough that everyone are posting their lives and running commentary onto the cloud; it must come with a photo or illustration of some sort. Millions of photos are posted each day just onto Facebook alone.
So against all of that noise, I need to be hear or rather more importantly, seen. So too, I need a vigourous social media presence.
The original social media for me is my personal website which has gone through so many changes over the years before settling down to its current focus. It will be dedicated to all things photography and a home base of sorts for all of my other social media forays. which are, also, singularly focused on my photography.
Of course, the primary site for photography for a long time is Flickr. It was my primary outlet for my photography and I posted everything, and I mean everything I ever shot onto Flickr. But I sort of drifted away from Flickr as social interaction on the site was minimal. Not much feedback to my photos along with the fact that Flickr seemed to be adrift with little investment by Yahoo. That has changed recently with numerous site redesigns that have hit and miss. I still do not spend much time with the site but it still receives bulk uploads of my photos. Its photo organisation through use of photo sets, collections, galleries is unmatched by any other social media or photography site. As well, the ability to be an archive of all of my photos helps. No where else will you find photos from me dating back to 2005.
Today, Facebook is my primary photo hosting site though my usage of it has changed recently with a separation of my personal photos from my model and event shoots which will receive dedicated pages. The social commentary on my photo posts is unmatched as these are real friends commenting on my photos. But the inability to organize photos beyond albums along with the need to repost the same photo to whatever group you like to show off the photo because the share to groups creates only thumbnail links to the original photo leaves me dissatisfied. But that is where the photos receive the most exposure so I have to be where the action is so to speak.
Google+ has a great looking website, neat on-site photo editing tools and a lively photographer scene. But the problem is that few of my friends are on Google+. It is like placing your artwork in a beautiful museum but the museum is empty of people. Maybe in time, more people will come to use Google+ too which will present more opportunities for views. With Google+ and Facebook, it is usually an either/or situation as people just do not have time to keep up with the feeds from both sites and end up picking or the other with Facebook receiving the vast amount of attention.
500px is a great site visually and its intention is to showcase the very best of your photography. I tend to go and back on my interaction with the site; I find it a great source of inspiration for planning out future shoots. Still, it is recognized a destination site for serious photographers and one I can not ignore.
Twitter and Instagram are sort of the orphans of the bunch; ignored much of the time but will have spurts of activity when the moment strikes me to do so. I do not envision them to be primary drivers of promotion for my photography. I tend to use Instagram to document odds and ends from my life like the meals I eat. Twitter for awhile was used to drive views to my Flickr photos but when Flickr changed their stats page and how it counts photo views, I stopped posting photos to Twitter. Moving forward, I can see both of them being used to provide some running commentary of shoots, a behind the scenes sort of feed with the occasional edited photos making their way, always providing links back to the sites I want people to visit.
That is all of my current social media involvement. If I rank them by use, Facebook takes up most of my involvement followed by Flickr, 500px and then everything else in small portions. I do not see that site emphasis changing much in the near future but then again, 8 years, MySpace and Friendster were the top social media sites and see what happened to them.
So follow me here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brianleonphotography
Google +: https://www.google.com/+BrianLeon
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreyMasterBrian
Instagram: http://instagram.com/greymasterbrian
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ncbrian/
500px: http://500px.com/greymasterbrian
