The Power of Twitter: A Key to Success in Social Media Engagement

I recently put up a tweet with an image and I wanted to show how easy it is to use Twitter directly from its platform. I tweeted an image from our Atlanta Meetup this weekend, which was a tremendous experience for me. The photo was taken by John Mason, who lives in Atlanta and is an amazing photographer. I gave him credit for the photo and thanked him for his help during the Meetup. This tweet also shows how to embed images directly from Twitter, which can be very useful.

The Importance of Engaging with Your Audience

As you can see, one of my followers was John Mason himself! He saw that I mentioned him in the tweet, so we had a verbal engagement on Twitter. This is just one example of how engaging with your audience can lead to meaningful connections. On Twitter, the more you engage with others, the more information will present itself to you, and the more people will interact with your content. This is key to understanding how to get the most out of Twitter.

Optimizing Your Twitter Profile

I want to take a moment to talk about optimizing your Twitter profile. First, make sure that your profile image is consistent across all social media platforms. You can use a photo from one platform and link it to your other profiles. Also, fill out your bio with a clear description of who you are and what you do. Twitter allows you to include a link in your bio, which can be useful for showcasing your personal work or website.

Branding Yourself on Twitter

Your profile image is a way to brand yourself on Twitter. Choose an image that represents you and your work, and make sure it's consistent across all platforms. This will help people get to know you and establish trust with your audience. Also, keep in mind that your bio should be clear and concise, and include relevant links.

Conversational Approach

Twitter is like the ultimate internet cocktail party. You show up and start talking about yourself all night, and people are going to get tired of it quickly. However, if you have a conversation with someone and then mention something you've done, it makes much more sense and provides context. This is how you're going to have success on Twitter.

Engaging with Your Followers

Once again, I want to stress the importance of engaging with your followers on Twitter. Check out your profile page and see that you have everything filled out. Make sure your profile image is consistent across all platforms, and fill out your bio with relevant information. Also, take the time to link to your personal work or website in your bio.

Making the Most of Twitter

Twitter can be a powerful tool for success, but it requires participation from you. Take the time to engage with others on Twitter, check out what types of things they're tweeting, and see how many replies do you get. Do you retweet people's content? These are all key metrics that will help you understand how effective your engagement is.

Understanding Your Audience

One of the most important things to remember about Twitter is understanding your audience. Who are the people who interact with you? What types of content do they engage with? How can you tailor your tweets to appeal to them? This requires some self-reflection and experimentation, but it's key to success on Twitter.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Twitter is a powerful platform that can be used to build relationships, establish trust, and showcase your work. However, it requires participation from you to get the most out of it. By optimizing your profile, engaging with your followers, and having a conversational approach, you can start to see success on Twitter. Don't forget to take time to audit your own account, check out what types of content you're tweeting, and make adjustments accordingly. With practice and patience, you can unlock the full potential of Twitter and achieve your goals as a photographer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to the show everybody I want to continue a discussion that we've had a couple times now about promotion and photography and i' this is interesting because we did a show a couple weeks ago called competing with the cat photos and this was kind of a tongue-and-cheek title and it was kind of funny and we were talking about uh you know how as photographers a lot of times the understanding of social media and how we use that to promote our own work is really kind of difficult and I'm going to start this off because I want to equate with you know my title is what would anel tweet and I want to talk about the hisorical perspective of this just a little bit and if you consider anel Adams who is you know the household name as far as photographers go he is the Johan Sebastian Bach of Photography and pretty much everybody knows who anel Adams is or was and you know if you consider anel's time where he came from and the group of photographers that were around at that time he was part of the Southern California School of Photography um you know he was very good friends and in colleagues with people such as Edward Weston Brett Weston Edward's son uh people like imagene cunning ham even wi bulock and this was you know a group of photographers that knew each other they did shows together they they uh got together socially for dinner and traded work and were critiques and colleagues and friends and you know even if you consider anel in the bigger spectrum of what was going on photography in the world you know there's a lot of photographers who and this is in no way shape or form a slam on anel I think anel has a wonderful place in the history of photography and is deserving to be as known as he is but when you consider some of the other people who were around at that time there's a lot of people who did much broader range of style uh much deeper work on an emotional level and maybe a conceptual level and you know anel going down in history is one of the greatest photographers of all time it's not that he didn't deserve that but why is he up there when some of these other people that are certainly deserving of being up there among the household names and the greatest photographers of all time what is that difference and one of the biggest differences I feel historically is that anel Adams really understood um the impact and the importance of promotion I think another thing I can say say about anel that is a testament to his success is that anel understood where his own strengths were now you consider during anel's time there was no internet um you know to advertise and get the word out about your work was very difficult and very timec consuming and many of you may or may not know that anel actually had a full-time publicist he h hired a guy named Bill Turnage uh and paid him a full-time salary and Bill still I believe head of the anel Adams estate um but he was his full-time promoter he worked hard to get his name in in papers and and his work seen and galleries interested and this is why to this day cuz Bill Turnage did such an amazing job on that um that anel is still when you go to a gallery that deals in historic work anel's prints sell for 10 12,000 $15,000 and up and depending on how big it is you know what the addition is and they did a immense job of self-promotion uh with anel's work and you know anel didn't have access to the internet and his solution to that was to hire somebody full-time to do it if you speed forward into the day we live now you guys have access to an amazing set of tools that for free if you understand how to get a handle on things and understand the language and the way to work on each platform you have better promotion than Ansel ever had that is free that you can do yourself and we talked a little bit about this when we were talking about our episode of competing with the cat photos and I think that photographers and I think artists in general we have a harder time promoting our own work and I think the tendency is is that we tend to put work on and it feels like we're just throwing photos out there and we're kind of lost in a SE of pictures and you know a lot of these things that people told me they felt was the you know the issue that they had when they were trying to promote themselves online so what I want to do is follow up on that today and we're just going to take Twitter today and I want to look at Twitter I think it's one of the more complex of all the social media Platforms in terms of what you're going to get out of it and what you put into it and how to understand it so without further Ado let's head over today and let's see what anel Adams might tweet so we're going to look at Twitter today and Twitter is really interesting to me because I think of all the social media platforms uh you know the big ones Facebook Instagram uh you know Twitter to me is by far the most complex and the most you know you can go really deep with Twitter and I think also it's really difficult for people to understand how to use it and if you want to have success on Twitter I hear people complain about Twitter specifically a lot because they say things like you know when I put a link to my portfolio I put an image I really don't get any interaction I feel like I'm just throwing photos out there and so a lot of things I want to talk about today are going to if you understand how to use Twitter you're going to have more success you're going to have more engagement and and you're going to have just you know more response to what you're trying to do on here and it's really important to understand a lot of stuff may seem very basic that I'm talking about today but I encourage you when you're done watching this is to go look at your own Twitter account little things like making sure your your biography is filled out correctly your profile image is up it's amazing to me how many people will follow me on Twitter and then I go to see if I want to follow them back and there's no information at all they have the default egg for their profile picture even worse they don't have a bio filled out even worse than that they don't have a link to their website so I can't tell anything about them and so you know if you want to have success on Twitter you need to pay attention to these things and it's really important we're going to dig deeper than that as well and I'll take you through that right now so on the homepage here we have this huge stream of tweets here which you know to me I have I already have 83 new tweets since I've brought this page up and I think the lat stats that I saw show that um Twitter has I think of all their users about 750 tweets a second that is a lot folks that is a ton of tweets and you know Twitter's whole shtick is that you have a very limited little space that you can write text in it's limited to a certain amount of characters and 140 to be specific when I click in here I've got 140 and it keeps a counter if I start composing a tweet it starts counting down so that's a lot of information even in little chunks the other thing is you can see that I follow almost 6,000 people on here and this stream doesn't make any sense to me because it's just it's just the the fire hose if you will of people I follow so we're going to talk about how to drill down into that a little bit and it's really important to understand Twitter on two fronts Twitter is a conversation it is a social platform so if you're just up talking to no one that's why you're not getting any feedback or any response or any engagement out of that you have to give to get and that's kind of the rule for any social media and it requires some time to do with it but it can be very rewarding on both sides and that's what we're going to talk about today um so anyway that's a little bio I can compose a tweet right there we're going to talk about things you might want to tweet in a second but just a quick overview under that you have Trends and the trends basically are a list of you know their various keywords and use of hashtags which is kind of the language of Twitter that start to sort tweets you know into categories and this is how people start to make sense of it so things that are trending right now like you know the number one right now is Cowboys and so I live in Dallas and the Dallas Cowboys um beat the reigning Super Bowl champions last last night and so that is trending Ebola obviously is a big news item but let's let's click on Cowboys here and you guys can see we'll keep this light but um as I go down these are all people tweeting about the Cowboy game last night so you know this is a good way to sort if you're interested in something that's trending or also compose your own tweets because I think it's really important to respond to things that are trending and that is a big key and I'll give you an example here a couple years ago and this is a very well-known example but if you haven't heard of it um during the Super Bowl uh there was a blackout and the stadium lost power and lights all went out and so the story goes is that Oreo as in the Oreo cookie company did a tweet during that I'm going to show it to you the hu post has a story on this and basically it was an image that was a stock Oreo image that they put a gradient on and it says you can still dunk in the dark with an Oreo thing out Oreo logo under that the the entire tweet was this image plus power out no problem and I love this because this is like marketing Zen at its finest there's nothing to sell here there's nothing to you know hey click here and go to our website or go buy Oreos the powers you know the people are not stupid they don't need you to spell all that out for him this was just such a great branding move on Oreo's behalf and as you can see it got 15714 retweets and 6,500 favorites now even if you're thinking that you know hey well it's Oreo that's a big brand everybody's heard of it yeah no I mean I think that that bigger corporations have an even harder time with social media because they can seem very impersonal and non-human at times and so therefore a tweet like this that has this much power to it and is this minimal is really important because that is how they start to personalize it it's kind of funny it's tongue and cheek and this got retweeted they probably got a ton of followers out this out of this and these are the kinds of things you want to think about and how you know you guys are photographers you watch the show how can you use your own images when there's something that's trending this will expose you to people that are outside of the your followers and the people you follow um and you are going to engage more with Twitter as a whole and this is going to lead to more followers more interactivity with your own material Etc so any it's really important to understand that and anyway so moving back over here again these are ways to drill down and and kind of sort the content um another thing that's really important is making use of what they call lists and for me this is what makes Twitter usable if I go under my profile up here and I click on lists when I follow people it gives you the option of putting them into a list and so so for instance I have one for my friends and if I click on friends this filters everything down to just people I've put in this list so these are friends and family so if I just want to see what people I know that are doing and I want to use social media in that way I can and lists are a big help on that a lot of apps and aable lists as well that you might use if you're not using the Twitter website so that's important to understand um another important thing to understand we were talking a little while ago about hashtags and you know hashtag typically is that pound sign and then you know my friend Wade down here how about them pound Cowboys right and so that gets you trending it also gets you searchable up here in the search box when you search for Twitter and I'll give you an example of something that I used recently and if you were looking for work and you want people to understand your photography when you do it this is a good way to be able to expose yourself to a broader audience and the people who follow you and if I go up here and let's go back under lists and I'm going to give you my example a couple months ago I was called to do a job and it looked like there was going to be some motion design involved the job didn't end up happening but the time I thought it was and motion design is not something that I do um and so it's something that I would want to hire somebody that does it a lot better than me and so what I did is I spent a little bit of time on Twitter and I was using the hash pound motion design and I'm going scroll down here because the tweet that came up and I started following this guy and other people he followed and it led me to more motion designers was this one Christopher Levan who I don't know but he wrote this tweet says hello good people I've updated my pound motion design reel and look it embedded the key image here from or the key frame from the video in has a link and I remember seeing that thinking here here we go I'm going to make a list I'm going put this guy in it and had the job gone through I would have contacted him and you know this is really important to understand because as a photographer if you are going to put a tweet out to your portfolio one look at how well this is composed it's very minimal it doesn't give you too much text he excellent use of a hashtag of motion design because that's exactly what I was searching for he also put two more hashtags in here animation and design you know gives him a little more a little more reach that way and also the way the media embeds it wasn't just a text tweet this is something that's going to draw your eye in when you do search and a bunch of tweets turn up it's really important to do um it's really important to to understand that like for instance if you use Instagram it's really easy to cross post to Media for instance if I'm posting to Instagram there's a little button that I can push that will also put my Instagram stuff on Twitter and it's important to understand that it only puts a link to that photo in it's going to promote your Instagram account it's worth the five extra minutes max that it's going to take or the 2 minutes or whatever to go ahead and post to both platforms the same image just so you have the media come up on Twitter and I I can't really emphasize that enough that's a mistake that I made for a long time and I'm not doing it anymore so I used to just you know Auto post to all platforms it kind of works between Instagram and Facebook but you know the image doesn't come through on Twitter and that's that's unfortunate and you need to understand that that's what it's doing like you know the one above it here here's another motion design reel and he just put a link to his Vimeo feed here you know that would have worked a little better had maybe and I'm not really sure how to do this it was a medium bed from YouTube or something like that where it would put the video in here and that's that's important to do he made my list too so it's not you know actually he was retweeted by this other guy so anyway all that to say that's really important to understand um also real quick I want to talk about when you do tweet what kinds of things do you tweet and the best way to do this is to go look at people who are successful on Twitter I'm going to pull up a profile this is David Hobby and most of you probably know who he is uh he goes by the handle strobist on the internet he has a Blog that discusses flash photography David's an excellent photographer and you know go pull up his feed and see what kinds of things make him successful on here and you can see when you SC scroll down his Twitter feed here that it's not hey look at my portfolio and everything there's a lot of media there's a lot of images that come up this is going to catch people's eye when they see you in other people's feeds if they're doing a search things of that nature the other thing too is it's not hey look at me look at my work all the time and that's a problem that people don't understand is it's not just a big self-promo soap box if it will work that way if you can blend that with things that will personalize you a little more so for instance you know there's a tweet here right with Jimmy Page from BBC News has nothing to do with photography it's creative process and he probably likes Le zpp one and it starts telling me more about David Hobby's personality it might be something that I find in common with him and so when you see tweets like that more commonly than you do portfolio stuff it's going to tell me more about who this person is and then when he does tweet his portfolio I'm probably going to be interested in clicking on it because I know who David hobby is right and so if it's somebody that you don't know who's just tweeting their work all the time I'm not even really interested in following them back because I don't know who they are and so I hope that's kind of a Zen moment for some of you that you know have been complaining that you feel like it's just putting images out into space you know it's be personable on there tweet other things um sometimes their photography relay like this next tweet he wrote technically I'm in college mom would be proud well here's a course that's using strobist in their curriculum so he tweeted about that doesn't relate directly to his photography but it tells me about David hobby he retweets other people and this is important to do a lot as well and he retweeted a tweet that somebody mentioned him in and this is where you start to get engagement going on with your tweets and your images and you know if you use this little at sign and then somebody's handle what it will do is if I tweet for instance at strobist and then I put a message in there it will contact David Hobby and he'll see it next time he logs in under notifications and people do this with me all the time when somebody does this with you it's important important to respond back now we all get busy and I get a lot of them and maybe it's during a day where i'm filming the show or working on photography stuff and I don't see them and so don't ever take it personally if somebody doesn't immediately respond but you know if you had a question for David hobby why don't you write at strobist ask a question and he may retweet it in this case somebody did some Halloween portraits or maybe he would answer your question if he doesn't respond you know maybe maybe do it again later don't spam him but you know don't don't give up either cuz we get busy you never know but that's this is kind of how communication works on Twitter um I try to tweet people back as much as possible and I apologize sometimes I don't always make it but you know don't ever take it personally and I never take it personally if somebody doesn't follow me back either because I don't need to be a follower of theirs to do the at reply you know so if I you know if you do at Ted Forbes I'll see it you don't have to have me following you back to do that so that's something to understand too but you know all of what I'm saying here is like ways to engage with Twitter and I'll give you another example like this morning let's go over to my Twitter feed uh and I will show you if I go home and let's go see my tweets and I put a tweet up right here and I tweeted an image and I did not do it from Instagram I did it directly from Twitter because I wanted the image to embed and this is a photo from our Atlanta Meetup this weekend and after dinner we went outside and my friend John Mason who was a tremendous help to me all weekend who lives in Atlanta he's an awesome guy an amazing photographer well his Twitter handle is John Mason well I didn't take this photo um he did and so I gave him a credit and I said thanks for an awesome Meetup this weekend and I wrote in parentheses photo by Johor masore and I also used Atlanta Meetup and photography and you can see that you know I tweeted this right before I started filming here but I have four favorites you know people who have favored this and I can click and see who they are and John Mason was one of them so he saw that I mentioned him in that tweet and he responded so John and I have now had you know one a very verbal one but we've had now had engagement on Twitter and so the more of this kind of thing that you can do and you can get involved in Twitter the the more it's going to work for you in the end the more information that you're interested in will present itself to you and the more people will engage with the information that you're putting up as well images tweets quotes whatever it is that you're interested videos um and that's how you're going to get more out of Twitter and understand how to engage in it and that is so important to understand and it's amazing how many people don't get that the other thing and I know this is dead obvious but I want to point it out to you guys go look at your profile page right now and see that you have everything filled out they allow for a wall image up here I used one from the Meetup that I thought was kind of funny where we were joking about the Godfather because I'm sitting at the head of the table but also important is they allow for a profile image you might keep that image consistent across all your social media engagement platforms um that's a way you can brand yourself if you're interested in that but have a photo in there take the time it says I care put a profile image in there do a small bio Twitter allows for it um it also allows you to put links in the biography now they will allow you to link to one website too but make sure it's filled out I have this all pointing to the Art of Photography so one thing I might want to do is this link that I'm allowed to have within the bio I might put to my personal work website or something of that nature you got to understand that this is really important to do if somebody doesn't know me and they go to my profile this is the difference of whether they're going to follow you or not and this is you know a make or break deal with success on Twitter if you have the egg that they give you by default when you sign up for an account you know don't do that make sure you have a profile image in there it's really important so anyway it's important to see and and you know do yourself a favor and like I said go take a little audit on your own Twitter account look at what types of things you're tweeting look at how you're engaging with it how many at replies do you do how many people do you retweet you know are you giving in all this because if you do that people are going to get to know you when you do tweet are you always tweeting your own work and kind of taking it from a very self-centered standpoint or are you having a conversation with people you know Twitter is like the ultimate internet cocktail part of you you know you show up and if I sit there and talk about myself all night people are going to get tired of that and they're not going to want to talk to me um if you have a conversation with somebody and then mention something you've done as a part of that it has much more context it makes more sense and that's how you're going to have success on Twitter I you know I hope most of this was obvious to you and I hope that you know this makes sense and start devoting some time you know whether that's once a week or once twice a week once a day however much time you have into actually engaging with something like Twitter and see what it can do for you and see what you're going to get out of it and you're going to find that it's going to do a lot for your work as well but you have to participate in order for that to happen so anyway we'll touch on social media in future episodes as well once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and I'll see you guys in the next video laterwelcome back to the show everybody I want to continue a discussion that we've had a couple times now about promotion and photography and i' this is interesting because we did a show a couple weeks ago called competing with the cat photos and this was kind of a tongue-and-cheek title and it was kind of funny and we were talking about uh you know how as photographers a lot of times the understanding of social media and how we use that to promote our own work is really kind of difficult and I'm going to start this off because I want to equate with you know my title is what would anel tweet and I want to talk about the hisorical perspective of this just a little bit and if you consider anel Adams who is you know the household name as far as photographers go he is the Johan Sebastian Bach of Photography and pretty much everybody knows who anel Adams is or was and you know if you consider anel's time where he came from and the group of photographers that were around at that time he was part of the Southern California School of Photography um you know he was very good friends and in colleagues with people such as Edward Weston Brett Weston Edward's son uh people like imagene cunning ham even wi bulock and this was you know a group of photographers that knew each other they did shows together they they uh got together socially for dinner and traded work and were critiques and colleagues and friends and you know even if you consider anel in the bigger spectrum of what was going on photography in the world you know there's a lot of photographers who and this is in no way shape or form a slam on anel I think anel has a wonderful place in the history of photography and is deserving to be as known as he is but when you consider some of the other people who were around at that time there's a lot of people who did much broader range of style uh much deeper work on an emotional level and maybe a conceptual level and you know anel going down in history is one of the greatest photographers of all time it's not that he didn't deserve that but why is he up there when some of these other people that are certainly deserving of being up there among the household names and the greatest photographers of all time what is that difference and one of the biggest differences I feel historically is that anel Adams really understood um the impact and the importance of promotion I think another thing I can say say about anel that is a testament to his success is that anel understood where his own strengths were now you consider during anel's time there was no internet um you know to advertise and get the word out about your work was very difficult and very timec consuming and many of you may or may not know that anel actually had a full-time publicist he h hired a guy named Bill Turnage uh and paid him a full-time salary and Bill still I believe head of the anel Adams estate um but he was his full-time promoter he worked hard to get his name in in papers and and his work seen and galleries interested and this is why to this day cuz Bill Turnage did such an amazing job on that um that anel is still when you go to a gallery that deals in historic work anel's prints sell for 10 12,000 $15,000 and up and depending on how big it is you know what the addition is and they did a immense job of self-promotion uh with anel's work and you know anel didn't have access to the internet and his solution to that was to hire somebody full-time to do it if you speed forward into the day we live now you guys have access to an amazing set of tools that for free if you understand how to get a handle on things and understand the language and the way to work on each platform you have better promotion than Ansel ever had that is free that you can do yourself and we talked a little bit about this when we were talking about our episode of competing with the cat photos and I think that photographers and I think artists in general we have a harder time promoting our own work and I think the tendency is is that we tend to put work on and it feels like we're just throwing photos out there and we're kind of lost in a SE of pictures and you know a lot of these things that people told me they felt was the you know the issue that they had when they were trying to promote themselves online so what I want to do is follow up on that today and we're just going to take Twitter today and I want to look at Twitter I think it's one of the more complex of all the social media Platforms in terms of what you're going to get out of it and what you put into it and how to understand it so without further Ado let's head over today and let's see what anel Adams might tweet so we're going to look at Twitter today and Twitter is really interesting to me because I think of all the social media platforms uh you know the big ones Facebook Instagram uh you know Twitter to me is by far the most complex and the most you know you can go really deep with Twitter and I think also it's really difficult for people to understand how to use it and if you want to have success on Twitter I hear people complain about Twitter specifically a lot because they say things like you know when I put a link to my portfolio I put an image I really don't get any interaction I feel like I'm just throwing photos out there and so a lot of things I want to talk about today are going to if you understand how to use Twitter you're going to have more success you're going to have more engagement and and you're going to have just you know more response to what you're trying to do on here and it's really important to understand a lot of stuff may seem very basic that I'm talking about today but I encourage you when you're done watching this is to go look at your own Twitter account little things like making sure your your biography is filled out correctly your profile image is up it's amazing to me how many people will follow me on Twitter and then I go to see if I want to follow them back and there's no information at all they have the default egg for their profile picture even worse they don't have a bio filled out even worse than that they don't have a link to their website so I can't tell anything about them and so you know if you want to have success on Twitter you need to pay attention to these things and it's really important we're going to dig deeper than that as well and I'll take you through that right now so on the homepage here we have this huge stream of tweets here which you know to me I have I already have 83 new tweets since I've brought this page up and I think the lat stats that I saw show that um Twitter has I think of all their users about 750 tweets a second that is a lot folks that is a ton of tweets and you know Twitter's whole shtick is that you have a very limited little space that you can write text in it's limited to a certain amount of characters and 140 to be specific when I click in here I've got 140 and it keeps a counter if I start composing a tweet it starts counting down so that's a lot of information even in little chunks the other thing is you can see that I follow almost 6,000 people on here and this stream doesn't make any sense to me because it's just it's just the the fire hose if you will of people I follow so we're going to talk about how to drill down into that a little bit and it's really important to understand Twitter on two fronts Twitter is a conversation it is a social platform so if you're just up talking to no one that's why you're not getting any feedback or any response or any engagement out of that you have to give to get and that's kind of the rule for any social media and it requires some time to do with it but it can be very rewarding on both sides and that's what we're going to talk about today um so anyway that's a little bio I can compose a tweet right there we're going to talk about things you might want to tweet in a second but just a quick overview under that you have Trends and the trends basically are a list of you know their various keywords and use of hashtags which is kind of the language of Twitter that start to sort tweets you know into categories and this is how people start to make sense of it so things that are trending right now like you know the number one right now is Cowboys and so I live in Dallas and the Dallas Cowboys um beat the reigning Super Bowl champions last last night and so that is trending Ebola obviously is a big news item but let's let's click on Cowboys here and you guys can see we'll keep this light but um as I go down these are all people tweeting about the Cowboy game last night so you know this is a good way to sort if you're interested in something that's trending or also compose your own tweets because I think it's really important to respond to things that are trending and that is a big key and I'll give you an example here a couple years ago and this is a very well-known example but if you haven't heard of it um during the Super Bowl uh there was a blackout and the stadium lost power and lights all went out and so the story goes is that Oreo as in the Oreo cookie company did a tweet during that I'm going to show it to you the hu post has a story on this and basically it was an image that was a stock Oreo image that they put a gradient on and it says you can still dunk in the dark with an Oreo thing out Oreo logo under that the the entire tweet was this image plus power out no problem and I love this because this is like marketing Zen at its finest there's nothing to sell here there's nothing to you know hey click here and go to our website or go buy Oreos the powers you know the people are not stupid they don't need you to spell all that out for him this was just such a great branding move on Oreo's behalf and as you can see it got 15714 retweets and 6,500 favorites now even if you're thinking that you know hey well it's Oreo that's a big brand everybody's heard of it yeah no I mean I think that that bigger corporations have an even harder time with social media because they can seem very impersonal and non-human at times and so therefore a tweet like this that has this much power to it and is this minimal is really important because that is how they start to personalize it it's kind of funny it's tongue and cheek and this got retweeted they probably got a ton of followers out this out of this and these are the kinds of things you want to think about and how you know you guys are photographers you watch the show how can you use your own images when there's something that's trending this will expose you to people that are outside of the your followers and the people you follow um and you are going to engage more with Twitter as a whole and this is going to lead to more followers more interactivity with your own material Etc so any it's really important to understand that and anyway so moving back over here again these are ways to drill down and and kind of sort the content um another thing that's really important is making use of what they call lists and for me this is what makes Twitter usable if I go under my profile up here and I click on lists when I follow people it gives you the option of putting them into a list and so so for instance I have one for my friends and if I click on friends this filters everything down to just people I've put in this list so these are friends and family so if I just want to see what people I know that are doing and I want to use social media in that way I can and lists are a big help on that a lot of apps and aable lists as well that you might use if you're not using the Twitter website so that's important to understand um another important thing to understand we were talking a little while ago about hashtags and you know hashtag typically is that pound sign and then you know my friend Wade down here how about them pound Cowboys right and so that gets you trending it also gets you searchable up here in the search box when you search for Twitter and I'll give you an example of something that I used recently and if you were looking for work and you want people to understand your photography when you do it this is a good way to be able to expose yourself to a broader audience and the people who follow you and if I go up here and let's go back under lists and I'm going to give you my example a couple months ago I was called to do a job and it looked like there was going to be some motion design involved the job didn't end up happening but the time I thought it was and motion design is not something that I do um and so it's something that I would want to hire somebody that does it a lot better than me and so what I did is I spent a little bit of time on Twitter and I was using the hash pound motion design and I'm going scroll down here because the tweet that came up and I started following this guy and other people he followed and it led me to more motion designers was this one Christopher Levan who I don't know but he wrote this tweet says hello good people I've updated my pound motion design reel and look it embedded the key image here from or the key frame from the video in has a link and I remember seeing that thinking here here we go I'm going to make a list I'm going put this guy in it and had the job gone through I would have contacted him and you know this is really important to understand because as a photographer if you are going to put a tweet out to your portfolio one look at how well this is composed it's very minimal it doesn't give you too much text he excellent use of a hashtag of motion design because that's exactly what I was searching for he also put two more hashtags in here animation and design you know gives him a little more a little more reach that way and also the way the media embeds it wasn't just a text tweet this is something that's going to draw your eye in when you do search and a bunch of tweets turn up it's really important to do um it's really important to to understand that like for instance if you use Instagram it's really easy to cross post to Media for instance if I'm posting to Instagram there's a little button that I can push that will also put my Instagram stuff on Twitter and it's important to understand that it only puts a link to that photo in it's going to promote your Instagram account it's worth the five extra minutes max that it's going to take or the 2 minutes or whatever to go ahead and post to both platforms the same image just so you have the media come up on Twitter and I I can't really emphasize that enough that's a mistake that I made for a long time and I'm not doing it anymore so I used to just you know Auto post to all platforms it kind of works between Instagram and Facebook but you know the image doesn't come through on Twitter and that's that's unfortunate and you need to understand that that's what it's doing like you know the one above it here here's another motion design reel and he just put a link to his Vimeo feed here you know that would have worked a little better had maybe and I'm not really sure how to do this it was a medium bed from YouTube or something like that where it would put the video in here and that's that's important to do he made my list too so it's not you know actually he was retweeted by this other guy so anyway all that to say that's really important to understand um also real quick I want to talk about when you do tweet what kinds of things do you tweet and the best way to do this is to go look at people who are successful on Twitter I'm going to pull up a profile this is David Hobby and most of you probably know who he is uh he goes by the handle strobist on the internet he has a Blog that discusses flash photography David's an excellent photographer and you know go pull up his feed and see what kinds of things make him successful on here and you can see when you SC scroll down his Twitter feed here that it's not hey look at my portfolio and everything there's a lot of media there's a lot of images that come up this is going to catch people's eye when they see you in other people's feeds if they're doing a search things of that nature the other thing too is it's not hey look at me look at my work all the time and that's a problem that people don't understand is it's not just a big self-promo soap box if it will work that way if you can blend that with things that will personalize you a little more so for instance you know there's a tweet here right with Jimmy Page from BBC News has nothing to do with photography it's creative process and he probably likes Le zpp one and it starts telling me more about David Hobby's personality it might be something that I find in common with him and so when you see tweets like that more commonly than you do portfolio stuff it's going to tell me more about who this person is and then when he does tweet his portfolio I'm probably going to be interested in clicking on it because I know who David hobby is right and so if it's somebody that you don't know who's just tweeting their work all the time I'm not even really interested in following them back because I don't know who they are and so I hope that's kind of a Zen moment for some of you that you know have been complaining that you feel like it's just putting images out into space you know it's be personable on there tweet other things um sometimes their photography relay like this next tweet he wrote technically I'm in college mom would be proud well here's a course that's using strobist in their curriculum so he tweeted about that doesn't relate directly to his photography but it tells me about David hobby he retweets other people and this is important to do a lot as well and he retweeted a tweet that somebody mentioned him in and this is where you start to get engagement going on with your tweets and your images and you know if you use this little at sign and then somebody's handle what it will do is if I tweet for instance at strobist and then I put a message in there it will contact David Hobby and he'll see it next time he logs in under notifications and people do this with me all the time when somebody does this with you it's important important to respond back now we all get busy and I get a lot of them and maybe it's during a day where i'm filming the show or working on photography stuff and I don't see them and so don't ever take it personally if somebody doesn't immediately respond but you know if you had a question for David hobby why don't you write at strobist ask a question and he may retweet it in this case somebody did some Halloween portraits or maybe he would answer your question if he doesn't respond you know maybe maybe do it again later don't spam him but you know don't don't give up either cuz we get busy you never know but that's this is kind of how communication works on Twitter um I try to tweet people back as much as possible and I apologize sometimes I don't always make it but you know don't ever take it personally and I never take it personally if somebody doesn't follow me back either because I don't need to be a follower of theirs to do the at reply you know so if I you know if you do at Ted Forbes I'll see it you don't have to have me following you back to do that so that's something to understand too but you know all of what I'm saying here is like ways to engage with Twitter and I'll give you another example like this morning let's go over to my Twitter feed uh and I will show you if I go home and let's go see my tweets and I put a tweet up right here and I tweeted an image and I did not do it from Instagram I did it directly from Twitter because I wanted the image to embed and this is a photo from our Atlanta Meetup this weekend and after dinner we went outside and my friend John Mason who was a tremendous help to me all weekend who lives in Atlanta he's an awesome guy an amazing photographer well his Twitter handle is John Mason well I didn't take this photo um he did and so I gave him a credit and I said thanks for an awesome Meetup this weekend and I wrote in parentheses photo by Johor masore and I also used Atlanta Meetup and photography and you can see that you know I tweeted this right before I started filming here but I have four favorites you know people who have favored this and I can click and see who they are and John Mason was one of them so he saw that I mentioned him in that tweet and he responded so John and I have now had you know one a very verbal one but we've had now had engagement on Twitter and so the more of this kind of thing that you can do and you can get involved in Twitter the the more it's going to work for you in the end the more information that you're interested in will present itself to you and the more people will engage with the information that you're putting up as well images tweets quotes whatever it is that you're interested videos um and that's how you're going to get more out of Twitter and understand how to engage in it and that is so important to understand and it's amazing how many people don't get that the other thing and I know this is dead obvious but I want to point it out to you guys go look at your profile page right now and see that you have everything filled out they allow for a wall image up here I used one from the Meetup that I thought was kind of funny where we were joking about the Godfather because I'm sitting at the head of the table but also important is they allow for a profile image you might keep that image consistent across all your social media engagement platforms um that's a way you can brand yourself if you're interested in that but have a photo in there take the time it says I care put a profile image in there do a small bio Twitter allows for it um it also allows you to put links in the biography now they will allow you to link to one website too but make sure it's filled out I have this all pointing to the Art of Photography so one thing I might want to do is this link that I'm allowed to have within the bio I might put to my personal work website or something of that nature you got to understand that this is really important to do if somebody doesn't know me and they go to my profile this is the difference of whether they're going to follow you or not and this is you know a make or break deal with success on Twitter if you have the egg that they give you by default when you sign up for an account you know don't do that make sure you have a profile image in there it's really important so anyway it's important to see and and you know do yourself a favor and like I said go take a little audit on your own Twitter account look at what types of things you're tweeting look at how you're engaging with it how many at replies do you do how many people do you retweet you know are you giving in all this because if you do that people are going to get to know you when you do tweet are you always tweeting your own work and kind of taking it from a very self-centered standpoint or are you having a conversation with people you know Twitter is like the ultimate internet cocktail part of you you know you show up and if I sit there and talk about myself all night people are going to get tired of that and they're not going to want to talk to me um if you have a conversation with somebody and then mention something you've done as a part of that it has much more context it makes more sense and that's how you're going to have success on Twitter I you know I hope most of this was obvious to you and I hope that you know this makes sense and start devoting some time you know whether that's once a week or once twice a week once a day however much time you have into actually engaging with something like Twitter and see what it can do for you and see what you're going to get out of it and you're going to find that it's going to do a lot for your work as well but you have to participate in order for that to happen so anyway we'll touch on social media in future episodes as well once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"