Effective digital marketing requires a strong understanding of metadata and how it affects your SEO as a photographer.  This article will be the first in a series meant to help young photographers get their images in front of more people and establish their brand.

So, why won’t I post original images on Facebook? It comes down to how Facebook manages data to ensure timelines are responsive. On average, 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day which makes it necessary to compress digital images to their most basic digital profile.  In other words, all of the metadata which includes camera settings, copyright information and the photographer’s info is removed by Facebook whenever an image is uploaded to preserve storage on their servers.

You might be thinking that’s not a big deal because you had over 200 “likes” on the last images you shared. Sure, it’s nice to see the “likes” and read the comments, but remember that is for just one image of the nearly 350 million images that were uploaded to Facebook today.  What you want to strive for is a digital signature that spans multiple social media platforms over multiple search engines.  You can’t do that when Facebook strips your images of all identifiable metadata.

I am not suggesting that you stay away from Facebook.  Facebook is too big and needs to be a part of your digital marketing strategy.  However, there are ways to maintain a presence on Facebook while protecting your brand and enhancing your SEO.  Posting links to photo galleries is a good way to manage your digital profile as long as your metadata is properly setup and tied to the text of your post.

The links I share are tied to metadata-rich images and include unique hashtags that are used in combination with other hashtags that are trending on various social media platforms.

As people visit your gallery from Facebook, they interact with your images and the resulting traffic helps improve your SEO.  Although that doesn’t sound sexy, these interactions help establish your brand and get you more easily found on various search engines.

With the inevitable security enhancements that will be introduced by Apple in iOS 14, having your digital profile established on Google/Bing/Yahoo will be necessary if you want people to see your photography.