Part 4: Social Media
In Part 3 we talked about video content marketing, which has always been the largest part of social media for us. As in all our marketing efforts, it has always been a bit of a cycle of working too much and not finding enough time to market ourselves properly, then marketing super hard when things go quiet again.
In this section we focus on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Instagram (@snowbird_films): a great visual platform to showcase your work, though not as organic as Facebook was in the early days or TikTok has been since launch. You need to do a lot of the legwork yourself to gain followers by interacting with other people's posts and content. Behind-the-scenes content, funny or heartwarming wedding moments and speeches, and beautiful cinematic highlights all work well. Using relevant hashtags and interacting with other users helps get content in front of more people. Organic reach can be limited, so paid advertising helps too — we've had success targeting specific areas and recently-engaged audiences, though these are cold leads that need nurturing until they're ready to book.
Facebook: another visual platform with a slightly older target demographic. Beyond organic posting, Facebook lets you target specific audiences with paid advertising. We've had much better success by retargeting the audience that showed interest in an initial open advert, then running a second advert that drives them toward taking action such as submitting for a quote or downloading a brochure. This is our main Facebook strategy now — turning cold leads into hot ones with a nurturing process.
Pinterest: more focused on planning and inspiration. We've found that creating boards on specific ideas we've seen at a wedding (unusual favours, stationery, cakes etc) can drive traffic to your site. For video, we created and shared video pins like one for a "Disney Inspired Wedding" which gained 7k impressions and a few links to our website.
Personally, we haven't dedicated the time needed to social media to get it to generate great results for us, and haven't consistently used stories or posted content — but we have had success by building relationships with other wedding vendors: creating videos and posts from weddings we've filmed specifically around venues, cakes, flowers etc, and tagging in the venue or relevant supplier (or just sending them the video to upload on their own channels). This has helped us form relationships with venues and get onto preferred supplier lists.
We believe the success we've seen with long-form video marketing in the past can be realised with short-form content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which are now focusing more on video, and YouTube is pushing short-form content too. Many wedding photographers we know say they get most of their work through Instagram, and we think it's about time social media worked just as well for videographers.
Social media gets you in front of a lot of people, but like goldfish, they forget you in 10 seconds until they see you again — so it's important to be consistent and patient, and not be afraid to try new things. Even if a post doesn't get much engagement, it's still valuable for building trust and getting your name out there.
With the right strategy and a bit of time and effort, social media can be a powerful tool for advertising as a wedding videographer. If you can help us grow our social channels reach out to us @snowbird_films.