Having both a personal and a business profile on LinkedIn is an important part of any photographer’s social media marketing strategy. LinkedIn is like Facebook for business owners and professionals.

However, one of the additional benefits LinkedIn offers is the ability to join discussion groups of industry professionals. I’ve been following and rejecting photography discussion groups on LinkedIn for several months, and found them to be both useful and a waste of time.

After searching through over 800 different photo groups, The ones I continue to follow are:

• Photo Marketing Association (PMA) Forum
• Professional Photographers of America (PPA)

These groups are essentially the same. Each is a combination of 1.) expert articles and 2.) questions posted by members asking for opinions from other group members.

The expert articles tend to have useful marketing information. Frankly, most of what you’d read on these two groups you’d also read in the JD newsletter. For example, here’s an article on SEO for a photographic studio.

The questions posted tend to be from other professional photographers, although you’ll occasionally be surprised at what constitutes a ‘professional’ nowadays. I’ve read useful discussions on the best digital projectors, but I’ve also read photographers asking know how to cheaply saddle staple 11×17″ center-folded paper to make a wedding album!

Bottom line: If you’re the kind of photographer who learns something (and likes the repartee) at monthly meetings like DPPA or Triangle, you’ll get something out of these groups too.

As to the hundreds of other groups I tried and rejected, it isn’t that they lack useful information, it is just that it takes too long to search through the junk posts to find it. Many photo groups are non-moderated. This means that anyone can post anything they want. And many photographers post junk like links to their own website in the mistaken belief that it will somehow improve their page rank in Google.

(note: Virtually every discussion group or blog uses a “nofollow” tag in comments. This means that linking to your website from a comment or post on linkedIn, Facebook, or a blog will not improve your search engine results).

If you’re already on LinkedIn, I would encourage you to join the PMA and PPA groups and select the option to receive one summary email with all the previous week’s articles. I’m confident you’ll discover a few tips each week that will help your business.

Tags: education

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 at 12:54 pm and is filed under education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.