Think of Social Media as another publication

If you grew up in the industry shooting and writing for printed newspaper, magazine or even for a website you need to see Social Media as another publication.

Too many editors, journalists and photojournalists are too consumed by the story and not enough about the audience. In most of the traditional places for news media to contribute the way it worked was somewhat of a mystery for the content providers.

Your content was the carrot and advertisers used your content to then get their commerce items in front of this audience. The system was so old that people would go to school and study how to do a part of this process, but for the most part most of the content creators didn’t understand how all this was being paid for.

Great content is useless if audiences don’t know that it exists. Today the audience is actually easier to reach than ever before. You don’t need publishers and large conglomerates to help you to reach them.

Today when you post onto a social media outlet like Instagram you are showing your portfolio. You have gone not to one photo editor but around them to their audience and asking them to respond.

Instead of leaving your business card you leave them a link to your channel. They can then decide to follow you or not. If they don’t then your content isn’t relevant to them. You either move on until you find the audience interested in your content or modify your content to appeal to the audience.

Now even though you are posting say on Instagram or Twitter you are not really in front of your audience until you start using #hastags. #Sports will put you in front of the Twitter #Sports or on Instagram as well. Think of Instagram as more like your cable company and the #hastags as a channel.

Twitter even shows you on your page the trending #hastags

I used to work for a Missionary Agency that had it’s own magazine and used state papers as well for distributing their stories for years. However, their audience stopped looking at their content. Those audiences were for the most part local churches.

My church's Facebook page

Today those local churches have their own Facebook groups, Twitter accounts as well as Instragram accounts. Now if you know their #hashtags you can in essence produce content and drop it right into their publication.

Take a moment and first Google an organization using hashtag like #firstBaptistHendersonville to see if you can uncover their audience. I found that they are using an acronym #fbchnc. Now if I want them to see my content I tweet a sentence with their hastag and then be sure there is a link to where I put the content. Wa-la now I have just published on their pages.

If you have Facebook just search for those organizations and audiences you are interested in joining. See if they will let you join their group. If they let you join then you can post your content in the group. Again, just like a publication as a way to reach that audience. Now as long as your content is useful they will continue to allow you to be apart of their group. If your content isn’t well received they will block you and remove you from their group.

Now if you are creating all that great content like the great journalist or photojournalist that you think you are then you are on the way to becoming a household name.

Now after a while you may not need to go and publish as often on these social media outlets because you have so many “followers” of your own and people are referring people to your content.

You can easily get advertisers at this point.

If you choose to create video content and post on Youtube for example their top content creators earn millions. Check out the article on Forbes about the top earners in 2015 here http://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2015/10/14/the-worlds-highest-paid-youtube-stars-2015/#2715e4857a0b16cdcf7f542c

For those of you who don’t want to do all this and just want to create content, then you need to hook up with someone who is doing this and get them to let you help them create more content. By the way doing this insures you will make a lot less money than if you did it yourself.