I have a membership to the Japanese Garden here in Portland, and I find myself there pretty much once a week. The thing that inspires me the most somedays isn’t the garden it’s self, it’s when I see young children with their cameras. I was there early one morning, and this family was beginning to walk through the gate when the young boy of probably 5 or 6 yelled at them all to stop and turn around to look at him in front of the entrance. I stayed behind him because I didn’t want to ruin his shot and watched as he brought his blue v-tech twist camera up to his eye and took the photo of them. He turned to me and said thank you and who I’m assuming was his mom smiled and said thank you as well.
My heartfelt light because this is the future practicing and honing in on their photography skills.
For as long as I can remember I have had a camera on me. I by no means consider myself a photographer, but I’ve always been documenting my memories by taking photos of landscapes and objects. There’s a photo that my grandma took of me, and I have to be about three years old in my uncles' bedroom at their house with his camera around my neck, a baseball hat on backward and I had arranged all of my stuffed animals on his bed to take photos of them.
The biggest joy that I got when I had my vintage business was arranging and styling the products showing how they could be worn or used in today’s world. I would spend hours creating the perfect flat lay or hiring a model for an afternoon and styling them in different looks and locations around the neighborhood. I would say that becoming a content creator was in my DNA since I was basically doing it since before the world even knew what a content creator actually was.
The key to creating good social media content like anything else is practice. Creating scroll stopping content doesn’t just happen in one click of the shutter or typing one narrative of your brand. Scroll stopping involves practice styling objects and assessing the light and angles when taking the photos. Good content means writing run on captions, then re-reading them and trying to get to the point faster. Remember you have 3-7 seconds to capture a users attention to get them to stop and read what you have written.
After you have posted your work, let it sit for 72 hours then go back to it and evaluate what part of the post got the most engagement. Was it the photo itself or was it that you wrote something extremely personal or was it that you let your sarcasm out?
Excelling at content marketing involves so much practice, testing, tweaking and then testing again. You really do need to know what it is that your target market is wanting to see or hear from you. The only way to clearly identify this is through committing to practice creating and evaluating your great content.