To maximize Facebook marketing, businesses should target the friends of their fans, according to a recent study by Comscore and Facebook.

The free white paper, “The Power of Like” explores the relationship between a business, its fans, and the fan’s friends. By focusing on friends, a business can achieve a much larger circle of views than by focusing on fans alone.

For example, Starbucks has 23 million fans, yet Comscore found that those fans had 670 million friends. By focusing on friends of fans, Starbucks was able to multiply the reach of their message by 30 times.

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If you have a small studio or you are a part-time photographer, customers will think you and your business are the same, especially if you use your name for your business. Ask me about John Smith Photography, and I’ll have a hard time separating John in my mind from his photography business.

In other words, for most customers your personal and your business brands are the same. This means that  if you want to build your photography business, you start by building your personal brand.

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Two years ago we wrote about the hidden fees banks charge you to take credit cards. Finally, something is happening.

If you take credit or debit cards, you are probably aware that in addition to a 1-4% transaction fee, most banks take up to 44 cents as a hidden “processing fee”. Pretty amazing when you consider that it costs them less than 4 cents to process a debit or credit card.

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If folks are looking for your studio online, chances are they are going to type in something generic like “photographer” and include a specific location. If you want your customers to find you online, it is important that you have your studio listed in every local directory you can find.

For example, I typed “photographer flint mi” into Google, and found that most local photographers don’t even bother to take the time to put their studios online. Looking for a photographer when you don’t know their name is like looking for a word in a dictionary when you don’t know how to spell it.

Below are 10 local directories you should check to make sure your studio information is listed and accurate:

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Press-printed photo books are great for senior albums, family albums and many other applications. But customers asked us if we could create a premium photo book that used real photographic prints on Kodak paper.

That’s why we created the Emerald Album.

Each page is printed on photographic paper, then mounted on a thin mount board. This results in an album with all seamless panoramic images, and pages starting on the left side. The front and back inside covers and first pages are white to give the album a finished look.

Emerald album covers are available in black, red or caramel leatherette, or you can create a custom photo cover.

See the Emerald or our complete line of photographic print albums here.

Order the Emerald album using our ROES software.

This.

Does anyone remember generic beer?

The idea was that the major beer companies could sell unbranded products to supermarkets at a reduced cost since they didn’t have to pay marketing expense.

For example, the beer might be a premium brand or economy lite – whatever the manufacturer had on hand the day they filled the generic cans.

So what happened to unbranded products? They are gone.

Over time, low cost and uneven quality cannot compete with quality brands.

A Facebook business page should be one of the tools in your marketing plan. Yet many photographers I speak with still aren’t sure of the benefit of a business page over their old personal profile page. So rather than explain it, here are two examples of Facebook marketing – one done right, and one done…

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Your competition is Disneyworld, a new couch, or a swimming pool.

That’s because in most folk’s minds, professional photography isn’t a need – it is a luxury. After the rent is paid and there’s food in the fridge, if someone has extra money left over, they tend spend it on things that make them happy.

While “happiness” is impossible to define, marketers have figured out that consumers try to achieve happiness by spending money on luxuries that offer status or experiences. Athletes promote $200 tennis shoes and celebrities promote stylish clothing lines so you can look like them. Vacation destinations show smiling families doing exciting things together.

So if professional photography is a luxury good, successful marketing should promise your customer status, a great experience, or both.

How do you do that?

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