Social Media for Photographers - Best 3 in 2023
There are so many social media platforms for photographers but what ones will gain you the most exposure. Here at TSOP we have completed a real-life experiment to answer just that. We’ve figured out which platforms will get the most engagement on your photography.
Why do Photographers need to post on Social Media?
So, you get up at 4am, travel for an hour, hike to a location, and finally get that beautiful picture you’ve always wanted of the sun rising over the mountain. You get back home, spend hours sorting and processing the pictures and now what? Are you going to just leave them on your PC or just show it to your partner? No, of course you’re not. You want to show the world this picture!
And this is the first thing to admit – you use social media to show off your work and you want other people to appreciate what you do. In some cases, you also want people to purchase your prints or services. As photographers, we use social media for ‘us’, sounds selfish but it’s true. Whether you are looking for inspiration from others or trying to gain appreciation for your own work, it’s ‘you’ that’s important here.
In steps social media to provide you platforms to show your photography to the world. And this is where the problem lies, there are too many people out there doing the same thing. And there are so many platforms for photographers to share their work, so where do you start?
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The Experiment
To find out the best social media for photographers we had to first figure out what to judge them by. We decided to judge them by the percentage of followers that like your posts and then by the amount of comments you receive.
The formula we used is this: Amount of likes on a post ÷ Total followers x 100 = Percentage of follows that liked that post.
The social media channels we used were, Facebook, Instagram, Vero, Flickr, Twitter.
I chose to use my personal channels @marcnewton for this experiment rather than TSOP’s as this will give a more realistic result for individual photographers. To view these social media channels please click the links above.
I posted nine separate image posts to all of these platforms over the space of two months then measured the results to see which one was the best.
As has been the case for years now, Twitter gets very little engagement so even though I continued to post on that platform, I didn’t add the results below as they were non-existent!
Best social media for photographers - The Results
For the full results please watch the video above. Below are the overall results of all nine posts on all the social media channels. The graph shows the total likes, the total comments and the average percentage of followers that like the posts.
Instagram received the most likes of all the social platforms but has an average of 5.73% of followers liking the posts. There were 98 comments across all posts which I feel is quite good.
With more followers on Facebook, you would assume you would get more likes. But as this experiment shows, this is not the case. You do however get more comments.
Vero
Vero is a fairly new social media platform for photographers. Even though there is not a lot of followers here, the percentage of followers that are liking the posts are on average 30%.
Flickr
On the face of it Flickr looks like it is getting fairly good engagement for the amount of followers but there was something that happened at the start that caused that. The first post was shared to their front page which really boosted it. That first post alone received 173 likes and 30 comments. After that, engagement on Flickr took a nose dive! Please watch the video for a full explanation.
Summary
What this simple test shows you is that it is hard for photographers to get engagement on social media. It also shows that it’s not about the amount of follows you have, but the amount of your followers that are engaging in your post. This is a much better metric to measure.
If you’re after comments and discussions with your followers, then Facebook seems to be the best one. Instagram is getting the most likes overall, but it is only 6 out of every 100 followers here that are liking the posts. Even though that is better than Facebook it just shows you how crowded these platforms are. There simply isn’t enough room for everyone’s photos to be shown.
Towards the end of this test Flickr was getting very little engagement and I’ve decided that I will not be posting on there for the near future.
Then we have Vero. This is looking promising. With not that many followers, I was still getting lots of likes. On average 30% of followers were liking the posts. This is brilliant! However, I have noticed this is slowing down exponentially. I think there has been a honeymoon period on Vero with people jumping the Instagram ship and going over to Vero to see what it’s all about. I do hope this isn’t the case as it does seem to be a good social platform for photographers. Only time will tell here.
If you do want to check out my socials then please click the following links Facebook, Instagram, Vero, Flickr, Twitter.
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