Natalie Franke
Natalie Franke can be found across many platforms of social media. I personally follow her via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+, so I've seen and interacted with her brand across many platforms. Twitter was the one that I interacted with the least, and so I was the most curious about the engagement via Twitter.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nataliefranke
Instagram: https://instagram.com/nataliefranke/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/nataliefranke/
Periscope: @nataliefranke
So, to compare her photography brand across the various platforms, I first looked at her followers.
*Disclaimer on the Google+, it wouldn't give me "Followers" just "views" so it may not be as high as it says it is.
**Linked in has 500+ connections but I can't see the total.
*** I have no numbers for her website or for Periscope.
Obviously her followers on both Facebook and Instagram far outweigh her followers on Twitter and Pinterest, and I'm not sure we're comparing apples to apples with Google+.
One of the reasons I decided to superfan photographers on Twitter, is because I wanted to see if it was actually a viable option to use as a photographer. It turns out, that although there is some interaction, and it is good for frequency posts, Twitter doesn't work well for Natalie Franke. In a candid conversation I had with her over email (after she commented on my first blog post - I was hysterically excited about that), she said,
"Can I be completely honest?
I don't find that my clients are even using Twitter anymore...
They are all on Instagram!"
While Twitter must have been useful to her at some point, Instagram has now become the platform on which she focuses simply because that's where her clients are. It's the most effective way to reach them. Later in that same conversation she told me,
"Lately, I've been using:
Instagram, Facebook, Periscope, and Twitter (in that order),
to promote my photography content!"
Instagram and Facebook are very visual, so they are more suited to a photographer's line of work, but the new algorithms that make Facebook a "pay to play" arena are driving photographers such as Natalie to the free Instagram platform.
Engagement:
Although I did a little with engagement across platforms in an earlier post, I decided that I would look at one of her posts that spans across Facebook, Instagram, her Website, and Twitter. (See below, all the posts are in one image.)
This was one of her recent posts, she put it up across all her platforms on May 15, so it's had about 3 days to be seen and to engage fans.
Forgive the small text, you can click on the images to see them larger. Basically though, Facebook and Instagram received far more likes or favorites than her Twitter. This is consistent across all of her posts. Her web, I didn't know how to track likes. Facebook received the most comments, with her website and her Instagram post coming in close second and third.
She has viewers and fans engaging, but Twitter truly seems dead. It's not for lack of content, because she does post many times a day. Simply put, it seems that photography is better suited to the visual social channels, and not so much the fast paced environment of Twitter.
Jasmine Star
Jasmine Star also has her hand in many platforms, but the only one's I'm going to be analyzing are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and some of her blog.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasminestar
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JasmineStarPage
Instagram: https://instagram.com/jasminestar/
Followers:
Here are the breakdowns for Jasmine's likes across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Jasmine's are significantly higher than Natalie's. Unfortunately, I'm not going to track down as many social media profiles for Jasmine as I did for Natalie. Jasmine is serving as a reference point for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. One interesting thing I did notice about Jasmine, is that her Twitter following is larger than her Instagram. It's the opposite for Natalie.
Engagement:
Some of this I also did in the previous post. But I did find something cool on the bottom of her blog! look at this! Basically, you can see the overall posts, comments, and page views! Let's just say she is way more popular than I think I'll ever be.
Back to the interesting differences between Natalie and Jasmine. Jasmine has more followers. This means her posts will get more attention, will be liked more, and will have more comments. But what I thought was interesting, was her Twitter.
Jasmine, on one of her more popular posts, has 11 retweets, 28 favorites, and 2 comments. This was posted today. She has more engagement on her Twitter posts consistently. But here's the interesting part.
For Jasmine to earn those extra engagement points, she had over 75,000 more followers. Again, looking at the interactions via Facebook and Instagram, Natalie wins. She has more likes per follower than Jasmine does. (maybe I might include more graphs in my final report.)
What stands out to me most here, is that Twitter isn't effective for photographers. Sure there are ways to increase your interaction, but it's a high content volume platform, that seems to be an inadequate match for the photography mindset and style. Other social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are better options for photographers, regardless of following, but more importably for startups like me.
Katie,
ReplyDeleteReally good stuff. I found it fascinating. I love the way you examined the same event from each of the different platforms. It strikes me that Natalie's lower engagement on Twitter may have something to do with the fact that she didn't take any time to construct an interesting message (just an announcement pointing to her blog that a post was up, compared to the personal stories and emotion she put into the FB and Instagram posts). Twitter volume is almost always lower but many organizations find that the QUALITY of those interactions can be higher since the important journalists and influencers are all on Twitter as a News platform. It doesn't seem like you buy that for photographers. I wonder if more news oriented photographers (like Lynsey Addario) are able to use Twitter effectively (see https://twitter.com/lynseyaddario). Tim