Welcome
Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! And even if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you were able to enjoy some time off with your families and catching up on movies you may have missed.
Our annual SeniorInspire 100 Photographers I'd Like to Follow contest is officially open and submissions are starting to trickle in.
The deadline to get your submissions in is January 16th, but that'll be here before you know it. You don't want to be the person writing that email of shame on January 17th asking if it's too late to get your entries in. It will be! 😉
So don't dawdle. Put your entries together and get them submitted. The process could not be easier.
From the submissions I've seen so far, this year's contest is going to be a good one!
Magazine Update
Want a free copy of our next magazine?
The SeniorInspire 100 Photographers I'd like to follow contest is under way!
Every year entries trickle in until one day before the deadline when we get flooded to the point of breaking the internet.
To give you some incentive to enter early I'm going to do a drawing every Saturday from the people who've already entered up to that point. So, if you submit your images in week 1, you'll be in all 3 weekly drawings.
Each week's winner will get a free print copy of the upcoming issue of SeniorInspire the Magazine, featuring the 100 Photographers I'd Like to Follow.
The first drawing will be this Saturday for entries thru tomorrow (Friday)! If you've already submitted entries, you're already in the drawing. If you haven't, you have until Friday at Midnight to get them in if you want to be in the first drawing!
Good luck!
Marketing and Branding
Are you using an SMS (texting) service with your seniors?
You should be!
Email marketing has been around for a long time now, but I think most of us would agree the typical senior can't be counted on to look at email.
That's why a few years ago I started requesting cell phone info on all my contact forms and signed up with a texting service. If you're not sure how a texting service works, it's a lot like MailChimp but instead of adding email addresses to your mailing list, you add cell numbers.
So now, instead of blasting out rarely read emails to my list, I send out text message blasts that are being looked at much more consistently.
Since adding a texting service to my toolbox, I've seen a big increase in my message response rates and a lot fewer people ghosting me.
I did a lot of research on the different SMS providers available and settled on Textedly.com, as I found their pricing and message limits to be the most generous at the time. They also offer a free trial and an amazing number of bonus messages for new subscribers who sign up with them (make sure to ask them about this before you sign up).
Check them out and if you do sign up with Textedly.com, send me your email address and I can have them add a few thousand additional messages to your account just for signing up and being a reader of SeniorInspire the Newsletter!
Instagram and Social Media
Social media influencers charge what for what?
In this crazy world we live in, being a social media influencer can be a career! 💲💲💲
I ran across this rate card for a social media influencer I don't know, and immediately starting doing the math.
This young lady can make a pretty amazing living doing just 5 TikTok posts a month. I mean, $300,000/year for learning a few dances? Sign me up!
But once I got past the math, I started looking at what she charges for the different types of posts she offers. And the thing that jumped out immediately is how much value she places on an Insta Feed post as compared to a story.
$3,000 for the feed post ($6k if it's a multi-image carousel post), as opposed to a measly $600 for a story.
Wow! That really sheds some light on one of the biggest gripes I see about seniors and Instagram.
They repost our images to their stories at the drop of a hat, but getting that coveted spot in their feed is becoming more rare.
So while it might seem weird that your senior will post an out of focus snap of her and her friends sticking their tongues out at a dimly lit party, but not one of yours that she said she loved, the value she places on her feed posts is just a lot higher than how she sees her stories.
Could it be seniors understand the marketing value of that feed post and just don't want to give it up so easily?
I'm starting to think the answer to that is, yes!
So when you're complaining about seniors not reposting your photos, consider how much value they put in that real estate and come up with ways to incent them to give it up.
What those incentives are, I still haven't figured out. 😉
Free puppies? 🐶🐶🐶
And Finally
Hope you all have a Happy New Year!
I don't know about you, but I'm glad to be leaving 2021 (and its evil step-Mom, 2020) behind. Here's to an incredible 2022!!