Boost Your Team's Online Presence and Worth by Shooting BTS

Makeup artists and hairstylists are as much artists as we are as photographers. However, when starting out, they often lack quality content to promote their work. Even later on when well established they sometimes require content to keep their social network feeds regularly updated. While working for free all the time for everyone isn’t sustainable, helping out people we work with may be beneficial for everyone. Here are two simple things you can do while on set to help your team out with their social presence and marketing. Best of all, it may even boost your social engagement and followers base as well as your work.

Instagram Stories and Behind-the-Scenes Pictures

Our followers enjoy learning about what’s going on behind the scenes. Showing them where you are, what you do, and who you are usually get them engaged. I’ve noticed that some of my behind-the-scenes Instagram Stories have more views than final images from the same shoot, so I try to keep my story up to date as much as possible when interesting things happen.

But Stories are also a great way to share someone else’s account with your followers. When on a shoot, during makeup and hair styling, you certainly have a little bit of down time here and there. Be sure to take a few behind-the-scenes pictures of your team being showcased at work and post them on your Story. Either take a picture as you would if you were documenting the moment, not just a snapshot, or grab a frame from the video you're going to shoot after reading the second part of this article.

This will do a few things for you and your team. One, you’ll have high-quality content in your Story that stands out and makes people stop instead of swiping to the next one. Second, it’ll drive people to your team’s account if you tag them correctly. And third, if you give the images to your team, they can repost them on their social medias and also use them to promote themselves in whatever support they need to, such as their website.

Create a Behind-the-Scenes Video

All of our cameras nowadays can shoot video as well as stills. So why not use it and shoot a short behind-the-scenes video of the getting ready part of your session? It makes more content for everyone, it forces you to try and work with a new media, and, best of all, it’s the best way to share a shoot’s mood with everyone. I personally also like to use them as a teaser before releasing a series of images. It makes people wonder what’s going to come next while giving enough content to entertain them.

Shooting a two-minute long video may be a bit much at the beginning, especially if you are not used to editing video. But no need for complicated videos. The very first BTS I did was only a few seconds long and edited on my phone using the iMovie app for iOS. Everyone was quite happy with it.

But then I decided to work differently and try to create more refined videos of the makeup. I used DaVinci Resolve as my primary video editing tool, and color-graded my sequences as well. While the result is still not perfect, it’s still much better, and now I could even see adding video into my work on the long term thanks to creating these BTS.

Video is a lot of fun and something every photographer should try, particularly those who rely a lot on social media. Shoot videos to integrate them into your stories, on your social media accounts, or even create a YouTube channel.

And if you enjoy it, perhaps you’ll start shooting a full behind the scenes of your shoot and not just the getting ready. At least that’s what slowly happening to me. Filming the makeup and hairstyling is an excellent way to ease into it, but I’m sure you’ll soon want more once you realize how people react to it. If that’s the case, be sure to share your behind-the-scenes videos with us.

What do you think of these two ideas? Is it something you often do or something you’re going to try on your next shoot? Do you use any other way to help promote your team and show their work aside from sharing the final result? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.