Instagram Not Doing It For You Anymore?

As someone who produces film work and photography for my clients, I am always seeking additional exposure.

In the past the ideal space for this was Instagram, but that platform is crowded as users search for untapped hashtags to feature their work on (even if that tag has nothing to do with their content).

I wanted to share with you how much I enjoy finding outlier platforms, that add real value to users.

If you work in any form of content marketing/ web dev, you will know the struggle of seeking out high quality images that you can use commercially but don’t cost the earth.

As a result you might have heard of Unsplash and Pexels. Two platforms that allow users to upload high res images and share them with the community to be used in any way and anywhere they see fit, for free.

End of last year I had some images hanging about that I wasn’t selling on Shutterstock, and wanted to put to good use (not just taking up space on a hard drive).

Enter Unsplash.

And it was this month that I received an email from Unsplash letting me know I had hit 1 MILLION views.

I was stunned.

At the time I only had about 6 images on the site. That is huge unpaid reach I would never have achieved on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter combined!

I was now motivated.

In the past few days I have added more images, got my tags in etc. And BOOM, in the following days I got 5 of my images selected featured on the ‘New’ feed and accrued another 140,000 views.

Even better, somewhere on the internet are over 8,000 of my images as people have downloaded them and likely used them in their content (somewhere).

One quick Google Image Search later and there it is, my image all over the internet.

It may be a royalty free and crediting is optional, but what you have there is 1,140,867 opportunities for people to see my work and the URL for my website.

To give an idea of scale, since I re-doubled my efforts to actively share my work, I have seen an additional 335,147 views in the last month.

If you want to see it for yourself, it’s all here:

Since writing this post, in 24hrs, views have increased another 20,000.

From my experience of reach in the digital and print world, you would have to pay good money to put your work in front of that many people in such a short amount of time.

Yes, they are un-targeted but as an audience they are a niche group looking for high quality photography and engaging with your content. You don’t get that on Instagram.

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