words Alexa Wang
The real ruler of social networks is visual content. The researchers claim that videos are winning the race, but photography remains the best instrument for attracting, retaining, and engaging with the audience.
For brands, providing a good visual is vital, as it builds the impression about them and drives the sales higher. A professional approach is what gives engagement rate on the photo, whatever the product is. And it’s not about just the gear you use.
Creating compelling photo content for your social profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, is a complex of factors and techniques to attract subscribers or buy IG Followers. And in this article, you will find out how to create the best campaign photos for your blogs on the major platforms.
What Is Campaign Photography?
Traditionally, campaign photography is a genre of promotional shoots, typical for magazines. It is often mixed with fashion photography, but it has a more clear goal for sales, as the fashion genre can be described as an art form. However, the ultimate purposes of the campaign are to:
- Promote the products in the context.
- “Send a message” that attracts users’ attention.
- Make a presentation of updates/new products coming up.
- Increase the esthetic attraction.
- Highlight the details and demonstrate the quality.
As we can see from the description, the campaign is a mix of art and sales. As social networks have entered the world of branding, the understanding of the term “Campaign” has expanded, because basically anything a brand uploads can be considered as a promotion. The obvious conclusion here is that now you don’t have to come up with expensive studio shots each time you need to upload something on your social accounts – you can do it yourself and amaze your followers!
Next, you will see the most effective techniques and tips that will improve the quality of your photographs made for socials.
Watch for Balance
In each picture, it is important to place the accents perfectly, so the attention of the viewer will be caught at the right point. Your product has to be placed ideally. For completing that task, use the rule of thirds. This rule senses that the object has to be positioned on the intersections of two horizontal and two vertical lines that are equally spaced (so the picture is separated into nine parts).
In the photo above, the key accent is the model’s gaze. In the era before the proactive use of smartphones, to achieve the skill of positioning things perfectly one needed a lot of practice. Nowadays this job is much easier. To see the nicest place for your product, enable the grid function on your camera phone. This function visualizes the rule of thirds, allowing you to take accurate shots for your social media accounts. Instagram has this feature as well.
Use Symmetry and Geometric Forms
One of the things that attracts our eye and the eyes of your followers is symmetry. The nature of humans makes us a bit hypnotized by it. So, whenever you can see natural symmetry – use it as an interesting hook for your campaign content. However, this trick needs you to be careful – the total symmetry can easily become creepy, so be very demanding to such shots.
In this example, we can see the idea of the photograph, and the symmetrical view plays a prominent part in the perception of the image.
Note: natural objects are never ideally symmetrical – a slight difference in tiny details makes the composition look more interesting and lively.
Geometry is also a great help for you. When you settle the composition for your shots, try to compone the objects according to the lines of imaginative figures – triangle, square or so.
Crop, Don’t Zoom
Zooming in for rookies. Besides, zoom often lowers the quality of the photo, so forget about it. If you need to change the scale of your shot details, use cropping tools.
Mostly, modern editing apps offer the cropping tool with a grid, so you can preserve the thirds of your shot without losing the accents.
Remember, that some platforms require specific sizes and scales of the pictures:
- Instagram allows to upload square 1:1 or 3:4 rectangle.
- Twitter requires the aspect ratio 16:9 for embedded images, and 3:1 for the header.
- Pinterest – offers endless possibilities for uploading different pictures.
Play with Perspective
Various types of perspective can be used for creating compelling photography. They serve for setting a mood and leaving an impression that your followers can catch and understand.
One of the most intriguing types of perspective is a closed one. It means that the sensible accent of the image is surrounded by a natural frame. Here is a perfect example of a natural closed perspective.
Here we can see that the central object is a human, and the figurine is framed by the almost symmetrical trees on each side of the photo. The amount and scale of the trees (vertical lines) creates depth of the shot and a perfect frame for the accent – white figure.
Play with Textures and Contrast
Another rule of perfect photography for social media campaign is combining different textures to emphasize the contrast. Small and big, light and dark, soft and firm, furry and metal – there are plenty of combinations to use for your product. In the photo below we can see a fine exhibit to this method.
Despite the fact that the colors of an object and background are the same, the contrast is still achieved with the difference of wood and threads. Gold metal parts are playing as the contrast accents, helping the brain to understand what followers are seeing.
Find Reflections
This is a very beautiful and effective method to create an outstanding composition for campaign on your social media account. The reflection is a representation of symmetry combined with contrast textures, and it looks more mysterious and atmospheric to users. Creating such atmospheric shots are serving to deliver a message and set a certain mood for your followers.
Buy Yourself a Tripod and Mount
These terms are stranding for stabilizing gear for smartphones. They make your photos more stabilized and increase the chance to take a good shot at once. Shaky hands are not always a medical problem, but it is impossible to deny that this condition can make you pretty mad when taking photos with your phone. So to improve not only quality but the speed of your shooting too, you should invest in the tripod and mount.
Learn
Unless you are an undiscovered photography genius, you should learn how to take beautiful and selling photos for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr. There are many factors that you should train if you want to create worthy content for your followers:
- Feeling of esthetics
- Visual library
- Basic photography techniques
- Technical capacity and potential of your device.
All these, except visual libraries, can be successfully achieved in photography schools. Experienced photographers will gladly share their knowledge in workshops and courses, so if the budget allows you, take some classes. Besides, achieving new knowledge is good for your health :)
Visual library is a quality of experience. The more examples you see, the better result you will get by yourself, because your mind will have references to pick from and will offer you ideas on the go.
Share Personal Content
Not necessary it should be your private life. But you can turn the busy days of your production into the special content genre for your social media campaign. Making funny or educational insights into the way your company works is a very improving practice for your rates. But first, make sure your employees don’t mind the photos taken. Inner memes, interviews, meet-and-greet the workers – all those are good material for photography.
Think out of the Box
The competition level is enormous these days, in any industry. So to drive the attention of users to your profile, you must upload something that will amaze them, what will make them say “WOW” and trigger their wish to follow, comment, like, and share your photos. This task can be hard to fulfill, but here is the ultimate advice for you to do that:
Train yourself to see spectacular details in anything that is around you. The beauty and perfection of nature and daily events can become your inspiration and give you new ideas for content.
Besides, your product can only be sold well on social media, if the photographs give out the message and the uniqueness of your brand for followers.
Use Additional Lenses
Luckily, we live in the era of expanded usage of mobile devices. The market offers many things that can enhance your performance online – and the set of additional lenses for your phone is on that list too. The basic set that can be bought anywhere is a fish-eye lens, and wide-angle. Both of them can give your photos for campaigns a classy look and help you to dilute your feed with interesting pics which bring your followers’ attention. And it is also quite a fun thing to experiment with.
To improve your experience of stories – buy a glow light that can be attached to your device – studio light would not hurt anyone.
Conclusion
There are many tips that you can use when you want to create better photos for your social media profiles. But the most important thing is that you let yourself be inspired by casual things around you and take your time to seek new items to add to your visual library.
