Facebook for Creative Pros

- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington, and today, we're gonna explore how to use Facebook as a marketing and business tool for those of you who work as photographers, video professionals, or graphic designers, essentially a creative professional. Now you might be thinking, well I've been using Facebook for a while. It's not that hard, and you're absolutely correct. Facebook, of course, is one of the easiest to use and most popular websites on the planet, but there's a lot of hidden power in there and a lot of great things to take advantage of.

So in this course, I'm gonna help you really unlock it's potential by both sharing technical secrets and some business strategy. We're gonna take a look at the evolution of Facebook, how it's transitioned from being all about the individual to truly being a business tool, and some of the different things that can help you better engage with your customers or potential customers. We'll also talk about connecting with both colleagues and clients, how you can use this as a networking tool. Obviously, you're probably relying upon LinkedIn as a great tool for keeping in touch with your with network, but Facebook is another tool that you can use to reach different types of clients, particularly people that you haven't yet established a business relationship with.

We'll then talk about creating a company page. Even if you're an individual, a sole proprietor, having a company page is a good idea. There are certain tools, particularly with advertising and monetization that you're going to need to have a business presence. So I'll walk you through how to do that. Next, we'll talk about sharing work samples, whether that's photographs, videos, or graphic design samples, and I'll share with you some strategies to optimize the content as well as why you might consider using some additional outside services.

We'll talk about strategies for sharing content, including scheduling posts, as well as relying upon outside helper services to give you additional functionality on the Facebook platform. I'll then show you how you can set up a project on Facebook, using project management principles and creating a group so that you can actually invite colleagues and use this as a business collaboration tool. We'll then discuss some of the high levels of using advertising on Facebook, how you can target potential customers and market and promote your business with paid ads.

This will just be a taste of this, but it's good for you to get some basic exposure, and if you decide that this is something that works well for you, you'll find additional courses available in the library to help you out, and then we'll take a look at some of the things that are unique to mobile Facebook, giving you some strategies for posting content on the go so you can take your smartphone or tablet with you on location as you're working creatively and share behind the scenes moments or other great options that you wanna let people get a glimpse at as you're working and being successful.

Before we jump in, I just wanna tell you a little bit about my own background and my relationship with using Facebook. I've been working for many years as a creative professional, particularly where photography and video intersect. This includes things like time-lapse animation and the ability to do motion graphics, and I have a visual communications company that regularly produces professional video projects and photography projects for a wide range of corporate and enterprise customers, but I'm also a husband and a father, and that's part of what Facebook is about, sharing your personality.

To give you a little additional background, I've written about 40 books through the years on topics like photography and video, helping other creatives be more professional and extend the success of their business. I've also recorded more than 200 video classes to pass knowledge on, and I'm a big believer in sharing of knowledge. Everyday, I publish two websites, and we routinely rely upon Facebook to reach our customers and to get that information to more eyeballs. I also own more than one business at this point, a production company, as well as an education company, and I've invented some technology along the way, and this is part of the discovery process, but more importantly, like most of you, I'm both a photographer and a video director, and I regularly wanna keep in touch with friends and colleagues as well as share the work that I'm creating, and Facebook is very well-suited for that.

I also have a business background as a project management professional. As such, I tend to look at things a little bit differently than the average creative. I love creating content, but I'm very strategic about it. So when I publish, I wanna make sure that I'm getting maximum results. That doesn't necessarily mean the most likes or eyeballs, but it does mean that I'm reaching the people that I need to. Now, speaking of reaching, if you do want to connect, I invite you to find me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to connect with you, and you will actually discover, a little bit later, that I probably won't connect with you on Facebook.

That might seem counterintuitive, but as you start to look at me on Facebook, you're gonna see a slightly different approach, and what that is is I connect with people that I'm already doing business with or that I strategically want to do business with as well as friends and colleagues that are a part of my bigger support network. As such, I use Facebook as a very personal tool for engagement, and I'm gonna share that strategy with you. I do also use it for some mass publishing, making sure that our website Photofocus reaches lots of people, and we engage them and share content across Facebook.

So I do use it in multiple ways. So instead of ending up just staring at the page, wondering what to post, let's give you some ideas and help you really understand how to use Facebook as a platform to connect with your current customers and to help you find new customers.