Social Media

Bots have been used on social networks for as long as I can remember. They are a way of growing one’s community without much effort and getting more attention than by doing everything manually. However, it’s not organic, and thus social media companies have tried to shut them down for a while. Instagram recently launched a witch hunt and managed to get Instagress to close down. Yesterday, another big bot service, Mass Planner, was taken down. Is it the end of the bot era?

An unnamed man living in Wisconsin hired a photographer to catch his sunrise mountaintop proposal, but all did not go to plan.

It was the go-to question last year when Instagram announced the essentially copy-and-paste integration of Snapchat Stories into their own app. Is this is a classic case of the pioneer being conquered? It’s starting to look like it.

So you got into filmmaking, and you want brands to pay for your work? Many of you are probably in this case and are wondering where to start to get paid jobs. Matti from TravelFeels gives us a few tips and requirements to make it possible and start receiving brand collaboration offers.

I've written about FTC rulings on paid social posts in the past, and most recently here, but we are at it again with one of the biggest fiasco's of the year so far in the form of the Fyre Festival. Celebrities went wild with posts in prep for the music festival set in Bahamas by promoting it and getting paid in excess of $100,000. Though, when the event started to go south and become a complete PR nightmare many celebrities deleted their posts and removed themselves from the issue, but kept the money paid to promote it. Not good.

There's a trend with our social networks these days. All the networks and apps call it "stories." It's on Facebook now, just like it is on Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Snapchat. It's a way of showing others your day, or, documenting it with video and photos and making it a story. This media that has been added to our daily feeds of consumption is obviously difficult for people who haven't learnt to filter out information that they don't need. I follow over 400 people on Instagram, so if each one has a story for me to watch my day will be filled up watching stories which is a lot of time to spend on things that might not have a positive effect on our daily productivity or work.

Being able to recognize an Instagram cheat will stop you getting ripped off and taken advantage of by brands, models, and colleagues alike. Once you know how to spot a faker you'll be surprised at how many accounts are actually doing it and how sophisticated this deception has actually got.

Instagram has evolved in many ways over the past few years, but the most significant change was probably the addition of stories. They are a unique way of sharing things that may not be worthy of your photo stream but still a part of your life or work that you want to share. Everyone has pretty much been using it like Snapchat even though it offers different features, such as uploading content just as if it had been taken with your phone. Jesse Driftwood shows us how he takes advantage of this opportunity to create unique content that drives engagement up.

Love it or hate it, social media has taken over many of our lives. And in the case of a photographic life, no social media name reigns more supreme than Instagram. With its photo dependent backbone and emphasis on visuals over verbals, shutterbugs rush to the app either as a means of expression, or a means of impression. It’s the one single place where your posts have an equal opportunity of being seen by a stranger in a small remote village as by a photo editor in the slightly larger village of Manhattan.

Each day there are new ways to accomplish the same task, especially with the ever-evolving social media whirlwind. Today I want to share my favorite two methods I use for sharing to Instagram (or any other social platform, but primarily Instagram since posts need to be made from your mobile device).

Instagram is a fantastic tool for photographers to promote their work. It’s not incredibly complicated to get the hang of it: post your pictures, add a description along with a couple of hashtags, and people can find your images. However, if you’ve been using it long enough, you may have noticed that your stream quickly looks like a mass of pictures with no continuity. Since the app doesn’t allow for pre-planned posts, it’s difficult to keep a visually appealing account. That is unless you use an app such as UNUM to help you out.

Photographers today are the first generation of image makers who are entering an industry completely dominated by social media. Over the course of the last decade, social media has utterly surpassed virtually all other forms of marketing and has quickly become a dominating factor in lives of a huge part of the population, especially photographers. Social media use, however, suffers from some pretty severe implications that can have a limiting factor on the quality of work a photographer creates.

The topic of Instagram shadow banning users has been a hot topic for the last couple weeks. Some people think it’s a real thing while others don't. The problem is that there was no way to actually prove its existence or to even see if you were affected — until now.

Most of us use Instagram to display our work. It has a great social aspect to it where people can follow your growth and see what you provide as a style. It's where clients go to see if you have what they want with regards to their brand image or way of portraying themselves. It plays an important role in a photographer's working life. As a social platform, they have copied from Snapchat with their stories and now they've copied Pinterest too. Although I don't like copying, let's see what it will offer.

A lot of people came to visit when I shared why most of us are not exactly the best at Instagram due to lack of hustle and effort. When someone takes the time to comment or like a few photos I will usually take the few seconds to go see their profile and immediately judge it. We all do it. Sometimes it is a good impression, but often since the majority of us don't plan the posts much, it is not. There are people out there doing it much better than us though. Let me show you some profiles that have a stunning first impression.

I'm happy to report that over this past week the Fstoppers Instagram account made it to an impressive 300,000 followers. Additionally, photo tags of #fstoppers broke the 100,000 mark on the social media app at almost exactly the same time. Want to see what images were most popular or the other analytical data pulled from an Instagram account this size? Let's have a look.

Spoiler alert: building a successful Instagram page takes work. Hard work. I'm sorry, but to be incredibly honest with those that have followed me since the beginning it takes more than a snapshot with my iPhone and hitting the post button. Breaking down the hours and even minutes in my day to show you my process and commitment to the platform will give you an insiders look to the mindset you need to be successful on Instagram.

We all work so hard preparing, shooting, retouching, and giving our all to creating our images. After everything is finished and the photos look amazing, we can't wait to share our photos to the world! But how do we know we're uploading the highest quality photos possible? Last year, I shared with you all a preset that I use daily to export photos out of Lightroom for Facebook. In this article, I'll add to my list of recommendations and show you two options that I swear by and have tested over-and-over to make sure I share crisp not only Facebook, but other mediums such as my website; so you can share the same quality!

I am not good at Instagram and neither are you. I know this because if you were good at it, you would not be reading this. The photographers who gain a following and crush it with likes and comments have put in a lot of work to get where they are. We have not, but we want more results anyway. Case in point, we suck.

Everyone wants to make money doing what they love. We love photography, and for many of us, getting paid to take photos is a dream. I never wanted to be a photographer; I liked it, but shooting full-time was never a goal I had early in my career and still isn't. That all changed when Instagram came along, and after a couple years of posting nearly every day and unknowingly honing my skills, people began coming to me specially for posts on Instagram to share about their brands. Here, I explain how that occurred, how you can find clients, know your value, and make money posting on Instagram.

Instagram has been quickly moving its platform to be more than the sharing photos with friends app it started out as. With the news that Instagram has increased its monthly advertisers to one million and plans to increase testing of their Instagram shopping features its obvious where the new direction is heading. Instagram tells Bloomberg that in the next couple months they plan to add an option to book appointments by visiting a company's profile. One of the examples given is being able to click a button and scheduling a haircut through a Salon's profile.

One of Billboard magazine’s latest covers – featuring former Fifth Harmony babe Camila Cabello – was recently shot quite infamously using the portrait mode on an iPhone 7. The spread itself was shot using both the iPhone and a DSLR. What does all of this mean for our ever-changing industry? Should we be worried? I chatted to commercial photographer Jay Mawson, who has shot campaigns for Nike and Adidas, to gather his perspective on all of this.

We’re all likely guilty of spending way too much time utilizing social media sites like Facebook and Instagram to promote our photography businesses. Considering the amount of time and the value of said time, is social media actually paying off for you?

Ever wondered how to create Instagram Stories in any editor? Bobby Burns (a videographer and occasional photographer) from Wedding Cinema University, has created an online tutorial to assist industry amateurs and professionals with this very problem.

"What if I told you..." that every bot asking for followers is actually the social media platform service itself asking for money in order to get as much reach as you did organically several months ago. Jokes aside... I read more about bots on social media every day and it's time to give it the attention it deserves. The future of social sharing is about to change.

Last night was the Academy Awards Ceremony; it's one of the most-watched shows of the year and the pinnacle of award ceremonies for the film industry at large. It's quite a who's who with a red carpet and television cameras all over the place and the people are dressed to the nines in the super-brand fashion designer dresses, flaunted for the world to see. Enter Casey Neistat, a YouTube creator who proposed Samsung make an advert that airs during the ceremony.

Be ready to freak out, Instagram lovers: you can now upload up to ten photos or videos – all in a single post! Going live today, you can now choose series of photos or videos inside one single post on your page without having to debate whether to share those b-side shots. This all comes with the announcement on their blog, which has a little promo video and a simple how-to-use lifestyle tutorial.

If you've been eagerly wanting to get your hands on the unique Snap Spectacles, now you can! Previously the only ways to purchase these elusive sunglasses were to find a pop-up vending machine across the states, or visit the Spectacles store in New York City. They are now available for anyone to purchase on the Spectacles website for $130 (U.S. Only). In light of the recent news, I put together a quick unboxing video to see what you can expect if you decide to purchase a pair.

Last month, I wrote an article called Hacking Instagram to Grow a Huge Following and Build Better Engagement with "Instagram Pods" that was received far better than I ever thought possible. I received hundreds of direct messages within the app of people asking about Instagram pods as well as wanting to join one. I apologize to those I have not yet gotten back with but rest assured, the hack seems to work and has sparked new life into my social media experience on the platform. Not only has it doubled my engagement, likes, and blown comments through the roof in comparison to a few months ago but its become a new found way to connect with new creatives from around the world.

A model recently allowed herself to be dangled over the edge of a skyscraper — all in the name of a photo with shock factor.