- Guest Blog
- Helpful Hints
Laura Lee Photography
If you’re like me, you are fully aware that social media can take your photography business to new heights and you spend SO much time on social media itself on your personal account it and yet you still claim that you don’t have time to post pictures and posts for social media marketing. I get it- and I say the same things. It’s difficult jumping from one social media platform to the next and figuring out the ins and outs of how to use these platforms most efficiently. But today I’m going to help you out with my current favorite– Instagram! I LOVE Instagram, I find it so inspiring that I get to follow people from all over the world and it’s the perfect platform for photographers- it’s based around pictures! It was literally made for us, and yet, I used to get so overwhelmed when I had to post to instagram everyday for my business because I got so tired of hashtagging everything! I just wanted to put up the picture and be done with it- ESPECIALLY after every wedding. I found myself editing every post to add hashtags that I had forgotten about (Like maybe hashtagging the venue name or town!). Then I discovered keyboard shortcuts! You are going to jump with excitement over this. Here’s a few super easy steps to making your Instagram game that much better.
Step 1. (Instructions for iPhone!) Go to your Settings: General: Keyboards
Step 2. Click on Shortcuts.
This will bring you to your keyboard shortcuts that you can customize for every shoot you do! No more hashtagging 8465286 things every time! Your thumbs will get tired!
Steph 3. Create
This is a shortcut I created for a West Point Wedding. Make sure you don’t make your shortcut be a word you would normally type. Example: I used to have “carolyn” as my shortcut for the engagement session I did of her and her fiance, then everytime I typed her name a bunch of hashtags popped up and I was obviously typing her name very often in every post I did from their session! I then quickly changed it to “carolynengaged” as this is not a phrase I would ever type in a sentence. Sometimes I’ll put hash in front of it and that would be an easy way to remember them all! Example: hashvenuename. NOTE: Your shortcuts can not have any spaces in between!
Step 4. Go into Instagram
Write whatever you want to write for your caption, and then type in your keyboard shortcut. In my original post I try to keep it short and only use my branded hashtags #imlauralee #lauraleephotography , I find it annoying when someone has a million hashtags under their caption, so I always post them immediately after I post the picture in the first comment so it doesn’t fill up people’s news feeds. The first comment will still be searchable so don’t worry about your pictures getting lost in the world wide web just because they aren’t in the caption!
Step 5. Once you type in your shortcut and hit the “space” bar all your hashtags will magically appear!
Wa-lah! Super huge time saver and makes social media marketing a lot less daunting.
I hope this post will help you save some time and hopefully you learned something new! If you’d like to follow me on Instagram I’d love to see you over there! @imlauralee. Cheers!
-Laura Lee