Are you using Instagram yet? You should.

Instagram is a free application that lets you add effects to images and save them to Facebook. Since being acquired by Facebook, millions of users have used Instagram to turn their Facebook accounts into channels to show off their artistic photography. In fact, Instagram has about the same number of users as Pinterest and Twitter!

So I’m sure you’re thinking, “I use good equipment and Photoshop. Why would I want to snap a low-res photo on my iPhone and add a cheap effect to show potential clients?”

The answer is, from a marketing point of view, your style and posting frequency is just as important as your equipment. Because it is designed to work with low-res smart phones (iPhone or Android), viewers don’t expect Instagram photos to be perfect – they just expect them to be interesting. With Instagram, instead of lugging your DSLR around, you can easily expand your subject matter to pets, animals, street scenes and local events with whatever camera you happen to have in your pocket at that moment.

See something cool on the sidewalk? Snap a photo, edit it in Instagram, and post it to Facebook in about a minute. If you take good photos, your friends and fans will share them with their friends. That kind of viral posting is what can make social media work for you.

Need some other ideas? Check out the Instagram for Business blog.

Like Pinterest, Instagram gives you a perfect opportunity to show off your strength – photography – using social media. The combination should be irresistible to you.

One of the benefits of using a Facebook  business page instead of a personal page is that you get an additional page called Insights. This gives you an idea of who is viewing your Facebook posts. The information can be helpful in 2 ways: first, to analyze the content you put on Facebook that is attracting clients, and second, you can learn a little bit more about your audience.

1. Analyze Your Content

Facebook Insights collects a lot of data about your page, from visits and reach to engagement and demographics. On your wall just above the wallpaper (click “show” if you can’t see it) you can see an Insight box that shows how each post you made in the last 30 days connected with your audience. You can get a snapshot view of how many people have seen each of your posts (“Reach”) and commented or liked or shared (“Talking About This”) matched against the times you’ve posted.

What you should see is that the more you post, the greater number of fans you should be connecting with (see example). If the purple dots (posts) are not making the graph higher, you need to work on creating better posts.

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Alyson Shontell, provided by

Teenagers are a good measure of what’s “cool.” Observing which apps they use and how they interact with technology can help the rest of us spot budding trends.

And lately it seems teens have grown tired of Facebook.

Adam Ludwin recently launched a social photo album app called Albumatic. Before its launch, he showed the app to a focus group of 20+ people under the age of 25. Most told Ludwin they didn’t like how reliant the app was on Facebook.

“They gave me the typical teenage response: ‘We’re bored with Facebook,’” Ludwin told Business Insider.

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With the new Facebook page styles, tabs along the top of the page have been replaced by applications (called apps now, but some old timers still call them tabs). These are little programs you can install on your own Facebook page(s). The default apps are “friends” and “photos”, but you can have many different apps. For example:

• Link to your Website, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest
• Coupons, Sweepstakes, Photo Contests or Polls

To show you how to set up an app, I decided to install one that links directly to the www.jdlab.com website. If I were a studio, I’d have an app that links to a wedding page, a seniors page, testimonials, etc. but once you see how easy it is to do one, you can do them all.

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When I was a boy, I remember surfing through the channels on TV and stopping on an interview with Prince Charles, who was at that time assumed to be the future king of England. I stopped at the exact moment the interviewer asked the prince, “When will you get married?”

What Prince Charles basically said was this: “As the future king, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with presidents, kings, philosophers and some of the greatest minds of our generation, and they’ve all said the same thing: wait until you’re 30.”

At that moment, somehow through my addled brain, a single, clear thought emerged: “This is great advice. I’m going to follow it.”

I thought of that story again when I read that IBM had recently spoke with 1,700 CEOs worldwide and asked them, “What are the most utilized customer interaction methods today, and what do you predict in the next 3-5 years?” This is the largest survey of its kind ever taken.

The answers were not surprising. Click the graphic to see the results.

Here are some highlights:

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With up to 80% of consumers reporting that in 2012 they searched for a service online before calling, strengthening your web presence as part of your total marketing plan is more important than ever before. Here is a checklist of 5 items you need to stay competitive in 2013. If you’ve done them, great! If not, they should go to the top of your to-do list.

1. Make your Studio  easy to find. You should already be listed in Google Places, Yahoo, Bing and more. Search for yourself as though you were a potential client. If you aren’t easy to find – or if your online contact info is out of date – this should be the top priority on your list.

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If you’re looking for the maximum number of people to read your Facebook posts, the time of day and day of week you post on matters.

Studies have shows that for Facebook, it is best to post in the late morning (10:30-11:30 a.m.) or early afternoon (1-3 p.m.) to get the most readers. You should avoid posting after 8pm at night or after 3pm Friday afternoons.

Similarly, they found that Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. was the best time all week to make a post.

As to the number of posts, experts recommend at least 1 post a day, with some businesses reporting success making up to 3 posts a day.

Of course, not every post should be “sales” oriented. A good rule of thumb is to make 1 “sales” post for every 5-7 conversational posts. For example, if you are posting once a day, you would only make a “sales” post once a week.

Note that these are average results from millions of posts and readers. If you’re interested in testing the best days and times for your particular clients, a free application called Tweriod.com will keep track of your posts and readers for a few weeks, then report back to you the best time and days for you to post.

If you’re Facebook home page is looking a bit tired, or if you just want to maximize its impact on potential clients and fans, here are 4 quick tips that will make the most of your page.

1. Change your banner. Start with a 851×315 px (exact measurements) image you’ve created in Photoshop. This can be a single image or a collage. Here are some great examples of fan pages if you’re looking for inspiration. To change the image, just hover your mouse over the image and click the “Change Cover” button.

2. Change your Profile Picture. Facebook uses this picture on both your banner and on the left side of your posts. It could be your face, your logo, or anything you want. The trick is to start with an image that is 180×180 pixels square, but still looks good as a 32×32 pixel icon. In other words, don’t put any text here. To change the image, just hover your mouse over the image and click the “Change Profile Picture” button.

Update your About information. Click the word “about” underneath your information, then click “Edit.” Make sure your phone number is visible, and that your address links to the map. This makes it easy for potential clients to find you. Don’t worry about the fact that they can’t see your email or website address, that is what apps are for.

Add some applications. The easiest ones are links to pages (used to be tabs) that you already have like photos, likes, maps or notes. Or you can use a 3rd-party application like Social Page Builder, Pagemoto.com, Tabfusion.com, to build an application (each has a basic free option or a monthly subscription fee). If you don’t use a 3rd-party application, you’ll need to build your own. In an upcoming article, I’ll explain how you can do that for free.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature. Introduced this summer, Promoted Posts let you pay for an individual post to be seen in more of your fan’s news feeds.

Are paid Promoted Posts worth the money? It depends.

One of the challenges of Facebook posts is that they are only ever seen by a portion of your fans. If you post when your fan isn’t on Facebook, by the time they check their news feed, your post may be pushed too far down the page to be noticed.

But the other problem is what Facebook calls EdgeRank. There are 2 settings on your Facebook news feed: “Most Recent,” which shows posts in chronological order, and “Top Stories,” (the default setting) which sorts and filters the news feed based on EdgeRank.

What is EdgeRank? (more…)

I listened to a social media marketing specialist recently who announced to a group of photographers that “Facebook is over. Kids don’t think it’s cool anymore.”

With all due respect, the truth isn’t that simple. Yes, Facebook is a mature product. It has probably peaked in popularity, and may even be starting to decline.

But no, it is not done yet. In fact, it makes sense to continue or even strengthen your Facebook presence over the next year.

Here’s why:

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