I can pretty much sum up what this entire blog is going to be about in one short little sentence:

With the move to California and the fear of starting my business all over (albeit not from scratch, but still incredibly daunting) … I’ve been delving into the research of successful business practices. Since May I have been looking into all sorts of ways that I could start my brand awareness campaign, to reach new clients. Even though Palm Springs is my hometown, relatively speaking I don’t know many people here anymore. The handful of people I do know have done a marvelous job of helping this transition to California a bit easier, booking me for various sessions and referring me to their friends (which I can’t even begin to thank them for). I knew I couldn’t rely 100% just on word of mouth (yet, anyway) and I knew I would have to step up my advertising game because let’s face it – I’m a little fish in an enormous pond.

So, I decided to try a few different approaches to build my reach.

How to Advertise Online

– Word of Mouth

– Paid advertising through Wedding Wire and The Knot.

– Paid advertising through Palm Springs Life magazine and the Guide. More on that in the next few weeks!

– Free listing advertising through Yelp and Google+ (and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to change my URL for my business page on Google+ – it still shows as Colorado Springs!).

– And of course, continuing the typical course for Facebook, Twitter , Pinterest and Instagram.

Before we even moved, I started working on most of these and within 2 weeks of becoming a paid advertiser for both the desert region as well as Orange County, both the Knot and Wedding Wire had paid for themselves with the bookings I got with each of them. Complete honesty here – I’ve gotten more wedding inquiries in the last 3 weeks here in California than I *ever* did in the 3 YEARS I lived in Colorado. They might not all be booking me, but just being contacted shows that my name is getting out there and that sites like the Knot and Wedding Wire really do help connect bridal clients with vendors. Numbers don’t lie!

I also started really working on my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by working on blogs, alt tags, and boosting my site’s interest appeal. I actually have been busting my behind on this for about a year now, hiring Braizen to help me with my brand appeal and website. Hiring Ashley, Walt and the gang has been one of the best business decisions I ever made. Go big or go home, right? 🙂

And finally, I started stepping up my Pinterest game. Pinterest can be a photographer’s best friend and worst nightmare – I love that it can provide so much inspiration for everything from dinner to DIY projects, what to wear on photo shoots and new pose ideas.

But let’s face it – Facebook is where the people are and many, many businesses rely heavily on Facebook for client reach. So, the last couple of weeks I have done a little experiment and to be honest, I’m partly shocked and partly outraged at the results.

First off, my top social source for my website/blog is NOT Facebook. In fact, it’s far below Pinterest and organic Google reach. I’m not too shocked about Twitter or Google+ since I just started really being active on those pages (and I’m not even ON blogger). But I’m more active on Facebook than anywhere else and it falls well below Pinterest and Google.

I paid to boost a couple posts (both with pictures and without) and I also paid to promote my page. My fan count increased by about 200 +/- in the last 10 days and many were new, local fans to my area (thanks to targeting my advertisement). You can see that before I did the “promote my page” campaign, my new likes were much, much slower.

Now let’s talk about paying to boost or promote certain posts (which creates those “Sponsored” ads that you see). Just like promoting your page, you can target boosted posts to certain demographics and locations to really bring in new fans that can actually be of value to the business.

Can you tell which ones I paid to promote? I’ll give a clue – anything UNDER 20% was NOT boosted. And that one 27% you see? That was a full album that my clients were tagged in, and most of those views were NOT organic fan reach – it was because the pictures showed up in one of their news feeds (not both, due to privacy settings on one account).

How much did I spend in total? Roughly $78 so far on boosted posts and promoting my page. Now, time will tell if that $78 (and counting, since my ads don’t expire until Monday) will bring in new revenue and have a “ROI” (Return On Investment).

And the other thing? Anything with 5% or less was a prescheduled post – with a picture was closer to 5%, withOUT a picture was 2% or less. My friend Stella Reynoso uses prescheduled posts like no one else I know and seems to have moderate success with it … but not me.  Out of nearly 6,000 fans – less than 400 people are seeing my prescheduled posts.

400. Out of almost 6,000.

The other thing I noticed, that really has me seeing red is that now that I’m NOT paying to boost my posts … my non-paid shoots are reaching HALF of what they were before I started paying to boost.

^^ Here is a screenshot of post activity two weeks before I started paying to boost. I had a couple low reaching posts (hey, can’t be super awesome ALL the time!), but for the most part I was having MUCH more success reaching fans BEFORE I start paying to boost. I think Facebook now sees that I was willing to pay to boost and now they are taking advantage of that and it changed the Almighty Algorithm.

So … what does all this mean?

For Facebook:

– What I’ve learned is that paying to promote posts is a bad idea. Not only does it lower fan reach post-boost, it costs a lot of money and I did not see any ROI from boosting.

– Paying to promote the page MIGHT be a good idea. Time will tell to see if any of my new fans actually book a session or refer me to a friend. The bad part about it is that there’s absolutely no way to track this information, to see if this particular paid page promotion is what led to the wedding or session booking.

– MOST IMPORTANTLY: Relying 100% on Facebook is just a bad, bad, bad business move. You see, all this trouble with Facebook only brought in 482 total website visits with Facebook being the direct referring source. That could be blog views, portfolio views or something else.

So … what can I do to reach new clients?

Isn’t that the million dollar question? In my experience, putting the effort into SEO and other forms of social media are the trick. Working hard at blogging correctly, using alt tags for all images using key words and having people comment on blogs helps a ton (and getting them to look at more than 1 or 2 pages within the website helps even more, to lower the Bounce Rate).

The more time and interaction people have on your website >> the more likely you are to be considered interesting to Google >> the higher your rankings will be >>the more likely you are to have new website visitors = the more likely you’ll get new clients.

So … What about you?

It’s definitely all a learning game and likely will change in 6 months <again>. What is your experience with Facebook advertising? What social media works best for you?