Professional Photos Can Boost Engagement

Photography has always been a hobby I have enjoyed ever since I was young. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to get great photos that almost look like they were taken by a professional but I am definitely just a hobbyist and I do it for fun.

One of the things I wanted to talk about was how big a difference professional quality photos can make in your online presence. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about the photos on your website or on your social media profile, quality photos make a huge difference. Nothing turns off visitor more than poorly lit, out of focus, low resolution photos.

First let’s talk about professional photos for your social media profile pictures.

Have you ever met someone at a networking event and had them request a connection on LinkedIn in the next few days. If their linked in profile picture looks like their kid took it with a disposable camera from 1985 doesn’t it make you question their credibility a little bit? I guess sometimes nowadays maybe it’s just someone trying to be artistic using some fancy Instagram filter… but I’m getting sidetracked here. The point is you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Now for my very own case study example of how well this can work.

One of my business partners from Colorado was planning a visit for one week to collaborate on some projects and hang out. I had a local friend who’s photography business was really starting to take off and I decided to hire him to do some casual business shots of me and my partner in some of our work environments.

Being that our focus is in the creative and tech space we kept it real casual, didn’t want to come off to corporate or stuffy. They got some great shots and it was a good time just screwing around, we even used some bikes that we rode there in the photos.

The main example that I wanted to use for this particular case study involves one of the photos they took of me that day. It’s a cool shot with the sun shining through the background and kind of blowing out part of the photo but it has a unique look. I decided to use this photo for my profile picture on the networking site about.me and that’s when I saw the tremendous difference a great photo can make it and getting noticed and overall social engagement.

I had setup the account at about.me around a year prior to this but I was just using the generic setting where it pulled your Instagram feed for your profile background. It looked okay and some of my Instagram photos were cool but it was a generic setting that many people were using. I turned off the generic setting and uploaded my new photo and almost instantly I got added to the about.me featured page!

AboutMe

You can see my picture here at the bottom of the featured page. One of the other things you can notice is that the majority of the people on this featured page have high-quality photos some that were probably taken by a professional. You might be thinking to yourself so what, who cares about being on some featured page… sorry if it’s getting a bit long winded but my point is the photo got me featured, being featured got me visitors to my profile.  The massive volume of visitors got me clicks to my websites and new followers on social media platforms.

AboutMe Stats

I hardly ever got any visitors to my generic profile as you can see but when I updated my picture on November 6 volume exploded and within a few days I had over 20,000 views! Of course after they took me off featured page my views drastically declined but I still average around a 1000 views per month and I’m still getting some decent click through’s to the links I have on my profile page.

If you want to check out my profile you can find it here: about.me/danafreeman

I decided for now this is my lucky photo so I’m using it as you probably noticed on the home page slider of this website too. Well, hopefully this was helpful case study and made some sense. Please let me know in the comments below if you have experienced an increase in social engagement due to a professional, unique or amazing photo.

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