Email, texting and social media are usually our BFF’s. We LOVE social media (well, Ashley does … Randy tolerates it, at best, haha!) and over the last nearly-6-years in business, we have seen social media explode bigger than we could of imagined for our business.

And, with the constant shifts in social media technologies and those pesky updates, sometimes messages from clients get lost. Trust us, it’s easy to miss these things when you don’t recognize a change in the app or layout!

In the fast-paced up-to-the-minute world that we live in, not replying back to emails and messages within a relatively respectful amount of time can (and will) hurt your business. We’re definitely not saying “be chained to your phones friends, and write back immediately!!” because not just no – but hell no. We all have lives and need work-home boundaries, right? But really, getting back to someone within 24 hours really is ideal.

True story: We once booked an amazing couple’s wedding once because we were simply the only ones who bothered to write them back and ask for a meeting (well that, and they loved us, haha!). 

Communication is essential for business, and it’s possible you’re missing messages!

How do we know this? Because it happened to us!!!

We’re going to share with y’all the 3 ways you’re missing messages from clients! And yes, these are all things we have personally experienced – so if this happened to you too, don’t feel alone because you most definitely are not.

1.) The Email Spam Box

About three years ago while we were living in Colorado, we stopped receiving inquiries for shoots and weddings. On average, at the time, we were receiving 3-5 inquiries a week for things, and after about three weeks of absolutely nothing – we started getting a little nervous and confused. What in the world was going on?? Analytics was normal, social media interaction was normal …

And then we noticed something. Our spam box in our email had a couple hundred emails in there.

Including a handful of inquiries … which by the time we got to them (with our most sincere and saddest apologies ever), it was too late. They’d already booked someone else.

What happened was at one point Ashley read an email on her phone, and instead of “Marking as Unread” it got “Marked as Junk” and from then on – every inquiry went straight to the Spam box. It’s as easy as that to mess up!!!

The Fix: Check your spam box daily! You never know what has snuck into there!

2.) Facebook’s Got 2 Ways To Mess With You

Oh, Facebook. You beast of a thing, you.

There’s 2 ways that you’re missing messages from clients here, as you can see above.

The first is the “Filtered Messages” part of the drop down menu. We’re not even sure why messages go there, but they do. We had it happen to us when they first rolled this option out a few weeks ago, and some messages from potential clients landed in there without us even knowing there was such a thing as a Filtered Message. And yeah, by the time we noticed, replied back with our “oh my gosh, we’re so sorry we missed you!” message … it was too late.

The second is “Message Requests,” which essentially is where messages from people you’re not friends with goes to in your inbox. Lately we’ve been getting notifications of message requests, but who knows how long that’ll stay that way.

The Fix: check these parts of your inbox!

And last but not least …

3.) Instagram has a Direct Message feature

This is the latest way that we have missed messages from prospective clients. Normally, a little orange number pops up in the upper right corner on our Instagram, but for some reason … it didn’t when we got a DM from someone who wasn’t someone we followed. And we didn’t realize it until we got a message from someone we did follow, and a notification popped up about it once we opened up the DM’s.

So there wasn’t a spam box or anything, it just simply didn’t notify us. At all.

The Fix: Check your DM’s, even if there’s no orange notification! We’re assuming at some point in the near future that Instagram is going to add a “filtered message” and/or a “message request” option, since Facebook bought them out and they’re becoming more and more similar with each update.

Like this sort of business advice? Want to see more? Be sure to follow our #RADedu Pinterest board, full of RAD advice for our photografriends!