"My wedding photography Instagram account is not growing. Why is that?"
As a wedding photographer, there's a good chance that a significant percentage of your wedding photography inquiries come from Instagram. So it makes sense that you want to see your account grow. The bad news is, it seems like it's impossible to do. If you want to know why is that, keep on reading.
I am sure that it has happened to you before: you were scrolling through your feed and came across a post published by some wedding photographer with a huge following. Any other day you would just keep on scrolling, but on that particular day, you decided to go down the unfortunate path of comparing yourself to that photographer. "How did she grow her account so big? Why do her posts get so much more likes than mine do? Why is my account not growing as fast as hers? Is my work not good enough?" You know where this is going. I'm not here to tell you that you should stop comparing yourself to others (even though I really think you should), I'm here to tell you that the reason why your account is not getting the same results someone else does may not be entirely your fault. Here's why.
I know that there are A LOT of reasons why one wedding photography account can grow faster than the other. Maybe they figured out exactly how often to post to keep their followers interested. Maybe they discovered a magical combination of keywords that helps them grow their reach. Maybe their posts were shared by some big and influential accounts. Maybe their photos really are better (sometimes it does come down to that). Maybe it's because of the combination of all of these reasons and some more on top. But, for the purpose of this blog post, let's focus on one specific one: Maybe they just started their account before you did.
Why does that matter? Well, think of it this way - the earlier you started your account, the less competition you had. The less competition you had, the easier it was for you to get new followers and grow your account. Every day, new Instagram accounts pop up. That means that your competition is growing and not only that, all of you are competing for the same thing - a spot on the Instagram feed.
It may seem like something out of The Hunger Games, but it's true. Even if you're not aware of it or even if you don't like it, you are always competing for that spot on the feed. Here comes even more bad news. If you think that you're "only" competing with other photographers, I hate to tell you, but you're wrong. You are competing with everyone. With big brands that have enormous social media budgets, with BuzzFeed that seems to be posting every other minute, with ordinary people that share photos of their baking projects, family trips and dogs.
Let me compare this situation with one that you're probably more familiar with. As a wedding photographer, you are serving a specific market. That market is finite, and it's probably not growing - at least not in a very significant way. If 100 people get married in your market every year, and only 3 photographers are working in that particular market, then your goal of booking 25 weddings per year is probably not that hard to achieve. But what happens if 2 more photographers show up all of a sudden? Well, your competition has now doubled. Since you were there earlier, of course, you have some advantage over them, but even still, those 2 photographers are bound to make your life harder. Maybe you will only be able to book 20 weddings instead of 25. Maybe that number will not drop, but you will have to work harder to maintain it. You will have to do a giveaway, start writing blog posts, collaborate with other vendors... And next year, 2 more photographers show up, and now there are already 7 of you trying to book as many of those 100 weddings as possible. It's the same on Instagram - every day there's more competition.
So what to do? I'm not trying to say that you should give up Instagram altogether. It still is a great platform to form connections with your followers and potential clients. But what you should do is to start using other channels so that you don't rely as heavily on Instagram. To put it differently, stop putting all of your eggs into one basket. As a Pinterest manager, I'd surely recommend you to start using Pinterest to attract potential clients. After all, it's one of the most popular platforms future brides (and grooms) use to plan their big day. Even better, the competition on Pinterest is much smaller than it is on Instagram because there aren't that many photographers (and other businesses) using it just yet. If you want to learn more about Pinterest and how it can help you get more wedding photography clients, take a look at this blog post or even better, go through my free course (click on the image below) that explains this more in detail.
