Tag Archives: social media

Building Entrepreneurship With BBYO In Detroit!

Building Entrepreneurship is a BBYO program that we were honored to participate in recently in Detroit!  BBYO is the leading pluralistic Jewish teen movement aspiring to involve more Jewish teens in more meaningful Jewish experiences, and both of our kids were very active in it while they were in high school.  We love to give back and anytime we can tell our story and mentor young people about business and careers we are game!

Building Entrepreneurship!

Ally did most of the presenting to this crew of young ladies at the Hilton Garden Inn in Detroit where I grabbed this pano of the room (with my iPhone)…

Building Entrepreneurship

We always think it’s important to get young people to start thinking about viewing the world from a business standpoint – even if it’s just in terms of following your passion and looking at the social media platforms they are already on from a marketing and career standpoint.  Follow the brands and professions you like on Instagram for example in addition to your friends!  See how they operate, how they communicate to their communities.  It’s easy to learn plenty even if you aren’t sure what you want to do with your life!

After we told the story of Frameable Faces with some tips about how we grew the business and some advice mixed in we took a couple of fun group photos… 

First with smiles…

Building Entrepreneurship

And then with some silliness… hehe…

Building Entrepreneurship

All in all it was a great experience for us with this fantastic group!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with them!

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Frameable Faces Photography
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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
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Social Media Services: http://M10Social.com
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!
 
Get the Doug&Ally Morning Show PODCAST at the following links!!!
Pocket Casts ➡️ https://pca.st/2a51xcac
TuneIn ➡️ http://tun.in/tjz3HW

Professional Headshots with Neighbors Kane Mostyn Insurance Agency!

We are taking a slightly different approach with this blog post!  Here’s the background:

Ben Clevenger of Kane Mostyn Insurance Agency Googled photographers in the neighborhood and gave us a call – they are located right around the corner from the studio at 5777 W Maple Road, Suite 185 and they were launching a new website in the near future, so they needed updated photos of the team.  They hired us and they were a pleasure to work with!  As we got to talking about refreshing their online presence and their image we naturally got to talking about social media strategy and we are pleased to announce they are now also the newest client of M10 Social

Now normally when we share examples of our work we post a few right here on the blog, but in this case we aren’t going to do that.  First we’re sharing the behind the scenes TikTok we put together…. (please follow us there).

@frameablefaces#professionalheadshots with Kane Mostyn Insurance! 🙂📷 See them at kmiagency.net! #frameablefaces #Insurance #MetroDetroit #Photoshoot #Photographer♬ Business (55 seconds) – TimTaj

We also have some fun behind the scenes with Ben himself from Facebook:

We love the use of this one that we screenshotted from LinkedIn – you can see they got really nice feedback on it!

Kane Mostyn Insurance Agency

Now, we would indeed love to show you more of the photos, so here is the link to the “Meet The Team” tab and you can see how they look on their website which just launched!  

Be sure to follow them on Facebook and LinkedIn and look for some fun new content including an interview series with Doug, Ben, Michael Mostyn and Larry Silver that currently has the working title of “Insurance Hacks”!  

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Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
Social Media Services: http://M10Social.com
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!
 
Get the Doug&Ally Morning Show PODCAST at the following links!!!
Pocket Casts ➡️ https://pca.st/2a51xcac
TuneIn ➡️ http://tun.in/tjz3HW
 
BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  

A Few Of Doug and Ally’s Recent Appearances!

We have had some wonderful opportunities lately to appear on a few different shows on the Internet as well as local TV and we thought we should gather a few of them in one place here on the blog! 

Appearances

Doug & Ally’s Recent Appearances!

Let’s start with the one Ally and I appeared together on which was on Fox 2 Detroit in a segment about how to take a great selfie for dating sites!  This one was pretty fun…

 

Next I appeared on my friend Rachel Moore’s livestream show Social Glue which airs on LinkedIn & YouTube ever week and covers all things social media with weekly news (which in the social media world can be like a month haha).

 

And last but not least here is my recent appearance on the Civic Center TV Megacast to discuss M10 Social and how businesses are adjusting and can adjust to the need for more of an online presence in the pandemic!  Give it a watch:

 

We hope you enjoy these appearances and there are actually more to come!!!

Get the Doug&Ally Morning Show PODCAST at the following links!!!
Pocket Casts ➡️ https://pca.st/2a51xcac
TuneIn ➡️ http://tun.in/tjz3HW
 
 
BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
Social Media Services: http://M10Social.com
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

 

Hello HAPPS! The New Home Of The Doug & Ally Morning Show!

HELLO HAPPS!!!!!

It feels good to be recharged again with this incredible new app called Happs, but first a little context to explain why…

Hello Happs

Periscope Changed our lives and then……nothing.

We’ve written and talked at length about Periscope – the livestreaming app that launched on March 26th, 2015 and we started broadcasting on on March 31st, 2015 at my buddy Alex Steinbock’s suggestion.  Right away we saw incredible potential to reach people around the world and share our studio in real time.  It took off for us pretty fast, and we made a big splash in the community with the first of several posts accompanied by livestreams where we did a fun take on the types of chatters and scopers you might encounter on the app.  Before we knew it we were trending, gaining thousands of followers around the world and being invited to speak at the Periscope Summit in San Franciscowhich we did!  That was a magical weekend and a magical time in general – it’s hard to describe what it was like in this shared community of streamers from all around the world.  If you were there, you know.  Even the Periscope team was there to hang out even though it wasn’t “their” summit.  That was nice and they were cool enough, although I’m not sure they ever totally got what was happening on their app…

It was around this time that we went beyond just scoping for fun and it became The📷Doug&Ally📷Morning Show!🎙☕️  which we did daily and are still doing to this day (more on this in a bit), along with a whole schedule of other shows on the platform including one we developed with our friends from the Periscope network channel Parachute TV called “The Photo Shop” and a game show on the Play For Stuff TV network called “The Frame Game”!  We were having a blast.  We continued to meet people at meetups in New York City, here in Detroit and we met more Periscopers on roadtrips in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi!  We even photographed some of them.  Periscope eventually monetized the app which was nice as our generous community tipped us for the work we put into the show to help make the time and “effort” sustainable (even though it didn’t usually feel like “effort”).  Twitter owned Periscope and integrated it into Twitter so we thought the future was bright.  Periscope had a VIP program with verified badges for people who had bigger audiences and we became silver VIPs.  They had “office hours” in a Slack group to answer questions from VIPs and presumably to get our feedback as valued members of the community.

But then it changed… 

Office hours suddenly started happening less and less and then they canceled the Slack group altogether.  A solid year or more went by with no updated features to the app.  Accounts started being randomly suspended and people – like us – got stripped of their monetization status leaving money contributed by their communities in limbo…with no explanation.  What a shame.  A real shame.  It seemed it was only a matter of time before yet another thriving app/community would be destroyed by Twitter (Vine anyone?).  We still kept on because our community was still tuning in and we were still having fun with our morning show, even starting up the Doug & Ally Morning Show Podcast, but we weren’t really innovating on the show itself anymore.  Like the app, it was running on autopilot.  And then just this week the announcement came – Periscope would be going away as a stand alone app.  Going out with a whimper.  Pathetic.

Hello Happs…

Almost instantly the buzz in the community turned to a livestreaming platform called Happs.  I was a little skeptical because so many livestreaming apps have come and gone such as Meerkat, YouNow, MeVee, Blab, Busker, and yes, Periscope.  But we downloaded it and set up a profile out of curiosity, and were immediately WOWED.  HELLO HAPPS indeed!

Hello Happs

This app has a dizzying array of features and yet is very intuitive to use.  People suggested we move our show to Twitch for example, but I’ve spent some time on Twitch before and find it to be the most confusing user interface ever.  It makes my head spin.  On Happs I had us up and running in a matter of minutes and I’m blown away at what you can do there.  It’s monetized which is great, you can multicast from Happs to other platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time with all the comments from the other platforms in the same feed.  You can bring other folks into your livestream on camera, and you can put up links, graphics – heck you can do just about anything that you might think would be cool to do on a livestream.  There is an entire producer studio on the desktop version and you can work the controls there while you stream on your mobile device.  It makes Periscope look like Prehistoriscope.

The CEO and other members of the team have been engaging with the community dropping into broadcasts answering questions, taking suggestions and they have been extremely welcoming to this huge influx of Periscope users.  They are working their butts off to add servers, keep up with stability and adding features on the fly.  It’s an exciting time again!  They even “transferred” our Periscope VIP badge to Happs and verified our account.

So we’re all in.  We certainly hope they can sustain their success and we are going to do everything we can to help.  We invite you to join us in this reinvigorated community to have fun, meet people and discover new corners of the world you haven’t seen!  We’ll be on in the mornings T-F sometime around 10ish to 11ish EST for fun and shenanigans and maybe even a little photography hehe… 

So once again, with great enthusiasm we say HELLO HAPPS!!!

Get the Doug&Ally Morning Show PODCAST at the following links!!!
Pocket Casts ➡️ https://pca.st/2a51xcac
TuneIn ➡️ http://tun.in/tjz3HW
 
 
BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
Social Media Services: http://M10Social.com
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

The Best Of The Class Of 2019 Senior Snapchat Stories!

What a year (so far) it’s been for our Class of 2019 seniors!  We decided to go back for the first time and create an EPIC recap video of the best of the Class of 2019 Senior Snapchat Stories for you!  We know not everyone has Snapchat, and even if they do they may not have caught all of our stories throughout the senior season so here we go… 

The Class of 2019 Senior Snapchat Stories

2019 Senior Snapchat

This video makes us smile the whole way through – it’s about 15 minutes long and includes everyone we shared highlights of publicly throughout – from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Pontiac to New York, summer, fall and winter, with plenty of wildlife, laughs, squad selfies and other shenanigans – but most of all our SENIORS!!!  We love these young people and there are still more of them to come so there will likely be a part 2… 

Enjoy!

BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
Social Media Services: http://M10Social.com
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

 

Get Your Professional Headshots! These Three Did – Here Are Examples!

Professional headshots are important for lots of reasons and lots of different needs.  For starters they look….well….professional, and if you are looking for a job, promoting your brand, modeling, or looking to get your personality across in a way that does it right your best bet is to trust a pro – not just Ally but in general.  Here we have a few recent ones to share with you just for fun, partly because it may be helpful, give you an idea or two, and let’s be real – we just like these people and we want them on our blog.

Get Your Professional Headshots!

We’ll start with Jack.  Jack is a bad dude and freshly graduated from the University of Michigan – he’s heading out into the workplace, already has a gig lined up and needs a nice professional photo to put online – like LinkedIn perhaps.  When it comes to professional headshots for many LinkedIn is the go to because that’s typically where you represent your professional self.  Yes LinkedIn is social, but it’s social in a professional context so if you’re a consultant or an attorney you may not want a funny photo of you eating a burger which could be good for a giggle on Facebook for example.  These are relatively standard with a slight difference in posture from one to the next which signals a little more engagement with the viewer respectively…

Jack

Professional Headshots

And now leaning in a little…

Professional Headshots

There are lots of nuances to the posing depending on how you want to represent yourself…

Of course it wouldn’t be a Frameable Faces blog post without some behind the scenes fun right?  Just a quick blast from twitter…

Leah

Next we have Leah – Leah is an aspiring model and needed some photos to send to agencies and eventually maybe some comp cards – we do plenty of these and they’re a lot of fun!  Leah was great in front of the camera!!!

Professional Headshots

Here’s a little Facebook fun behind the scenes from Leah’s session….  

And here’s one more from Leah…  what a rock star!

Professional Headshots

Ken

Last but not least here’s Ken – yes you recognize him as the play-by-play announcer for the Detroit Red Wings on Fox Sports Detroit.  Ken is obviously an established guy and needed a few different photos for various things he has going and in his case while we used the same blue / grey mottled backdrop we used for Jack above we changed it up and did a couple professional and a couple casual.  Different styles for different uses.

Here’s the casual in three quarter length:

Professional Headshots

Some behind the scenes fun where you can see Ken switched to a more formal look…

…and the result:

Professional Headshots

Success!

And now all three of them have the professional headshots to help them with their successes in the world!  Hope you enjoyed this photo essay – we sure enjoyed having them here at the studio!

BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

5 Totally Legit Reasons You Should Join Our Patreon Page!

Patreon is described in Wikipedia as “a membership platform that provides business tools for creators to run a subscription content service, as well as ways for artists to build relationships and provide exclusive experiences to their subscribers, or “patrons.”  We have our own Patreon, we are working really hard on it and we believe in it.  We hope you will join us and here are 5 totally legit reasons why you should.

Patreon

5 Totally Legit Reasons Why You Should Join Our Patreon Page

 

First of all, Patreon itself is really cool.

Let’s just talk about Patreon for a second if you aren’t familiar with it.  It’s a great website as well as mobile app that is growing and adding features and opportunities constantly.  You can find creators of all sorts to connect with there and subscribe to their page for anywhere from one dollar to $15 per month (and sometimes more for really big rewards) just for various levels of fun basic content.  Artists, musicians, comedians, business gurus, podcasters, vloggers – you name it.  And the creators who rely on this platform to make a living at what they do are generally really thankful for their communities who subscribe for their content.

As an end user you can go on the desktop version and even better download the mobile app.  The creators you subscribe to can upload video, audio, photos, livestreams, links, polls, stories, or just text  right to the app.  So you can listen, watch, comment, and interact with other fans & followers all from your smartphone.  You can access all of these things on demand as you like – a great way to support the people you enjoy on the go.  You’ll love it. 

Keep in mind that the best creators on Patreon typically have YouTube channels, blogs, Instagram and Snapchat, and a whole variety of profiles online where they’re sharing free content, but the ones who do it right are giving extra rewards and exclusive content to their patrons because the patrons are paying for it – they definitely appreciate your support.

As for OUR Patreon page, we’ve already posted a TON of stuff there…and we’re adding more.

We aren’t messing around.  We are off to a solid start with a handful of subscribers and we are working really hard to create content exclusively for Patreon.  Heck, part of the impetus for starting Patreon was the fact that people were asking us on our Periscope 📷Doug&Ally📷Morning Show!🎙☕ to do a podcast.  While we thought that would be fun we figured at some point it has to be sustainable for us to keep adding content that isn’t exactly our core business of photography.  Yes our content highlights our brand and is great for promotion but certain content in and of itself has value if we do it right and there are only so many hours in the day – as I said it has to be sustainable.  We felt a podcast along with some other things would fit the bill… so The📷Doug&Ally📷Morning Show!🎙☕………Podcast!  was born…

Patreon

We are having a blast with the podcast, and a shout out goes to the amazing Olivia Thai who supplied the little impromptu beatbox intro that you hear at the beginning of each one which we literally pulled from when she called into our morning show one day!

Meanwhile, we have SO much else to offer, and so we’ve been pouring ourselves into creating content for Patreon much like the courses we have taught here at our studio such as Doug’s teachings in his “2 Hour Social Media Class” and Ally’s “Photography 101” class.  People who follow us outside of the Metro Detroit area had been asking for a way to learn from us or get online courses and now Patreon gives us a way to do that with in-depth tutorials that we upload there.  The feedback on these has been solid (more on that in a bit) and we’ll even take requests on topics that our Patrons want covered specifically.  We do some of these with recordings of our computer screens while we’re walking you through how to create social media content or how to edit a photo in Photoshop.  These are great because you can access them on demand, at your own pace and you can watch them repeatedly.

We’ve added a few other exclusive series there too such as “Entrepreneur Life” where we talk about the highs and lows, thrills and challenges of having your own business – things that we’ve learned and sometimes the hard way…  We even include the occasional blooper!  As of this first writing we are at over 40 pieces of content total, available at the various levels.

You may find if you browse around Patreon overall that there are some who use their page simply as a donation mechanism – a way for their followers to contribute money to support what they are already doing elsewhere.  Not calling anyone out specifically or saying that’s bad per se…  But that’s not our strategy.  If you’re paying for our Patreon, you’re getting your money’s worth ON Patreon.  We’ll even send you a 📷Doug&Ally📷Morning Show!🎙☕ bookmark at the $5 level and up!

Our Patrons Are Happy – they are validating what we are doing there – so take their word for it!

We are getting great feedback so far and there are subscription levels for everybody – from just $2 per month to be included in our private Periscope group – this is a great thing by the way.  Sometimes we just go on Periscope live in a private broadcast just for our Patrons to get feedback, chat or we’ll even livestream there under our own personal profiles @dougcohen10 or @AllyCohen_1 if we feel like waxing poetic on our own passions like music, history, football, parenting – whatever, and the patrons are really enjoying this.  We are getting great feedback so far at all of the various reward levels.  Take a look at some of the comments from the page…

Podcast

Patreon

Tutorial on Twitter Lists

Patreon

Tutorial on Canva

Patreon

Random Blooper

Patreon

Participation and Community is at the heart of what we do – Patreon is a shining example

We’ve always said we are all the Frameable Faces – sure it’s Doug & Ally – we own the business.  But we’re part of the community just like everyone else, and it’s our peeps that make our studio and it will be our peeps that make the Patreon page too.  Our friend Gareth from the UK is “Pliny The Round” and he’s already been posting in the “Community” tab on the Patreon which is awesome.  The people do and will continue to shape the community there.  We’ve had Patrons make suggestions for things to include in the Podcast and we frequently reach out for feedback.  At this point we are toying with adding Discord to our page (an app much like Slack that gamers have traditionally used for group chat and voice to text around certain topics) which can be integrated with Patreon.  Just another way to bring the community closer together – so we’ll see how Discord plays out.  Regardless, with Patreon since people are subscribing everyone has a vested interest in making it great!

When we share tips we don’t hold back – we pour out our knowledge…

We don’t really horde our secrets.  We subscribe to the idea that sharing helps the community, it helps the industry whether that be social media or photography, and we never have just one main magic sauce really anyway.  Once we’ve shared the sauce we’ve already concocted the next one.  We’re always concocting a new sauce and improving the current sauce, and just because someone took our sauce and tried to make it doesn’t mean they’ll make it exactly how we made it.  If by chance they made it better than us?  Well than that will just give us something to shoot for won’t it?

If you like the way we do things and you think you could learn from us, you will at our Patreon page.  We promise.  Thanks for reading and we hope to you see you there!  We won’t let you down!

 
BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

 

Facebook Creator, SEO & more – Doug’s Social Stream Of Consciousness

 

Facebook Creator

A huge development just happened in the world of Facebook.  The launch of Facebook Creator is a pretty big deal for Livestreamers on the platform and we were able to download the app, set it up and go live with a bevy of new features yesterday in no time!  Here is the actual broadcast:

Thoughts & Tips on Facebook Creator

Let me take a second here to point out a couple of things and dissect our approach just on this first test of the new features in a screenshot graphic and then we’ll discuss further:

Facebook CreatorYou can see in the broadcast we were able to bring Jenny Q right onto the screen (with a simple click of her comment)!  There’s even a little video icon within the comments of your viewers while you’re live that lets you know who is available to join. 

Now I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail about how to set this up on Facebook – instead I’m going to direct you to the link that walked me through it on Social Media Examiner written by Peg Fitzpatrick.  As a side note it was Ai Addyson-Zhang‘s tweet of the article that led me to it by a simple #FacebookCreator hashtag search.

Meanwhile here’s a tip – you don’t have to purchase Canva For Work (as mentioned in the article) in order to get a transparent overlay on your screen.  You can create a basic graphic in the free version of Canva and then select for it to be transparent right in the Creator app and it will convert it for you.  Canva For Work might give you a little more control over this but you can get around it if you’re starting out. 

Having the graphics on your screen is nice – similar to what I used to do with OBS for Periscope broadcasts for certain shows.  Now granted they aren’t as flexible – you can’t change them up on the fly during a broadcast, but they are cool to have there as I outlined in the graphic above.  The option to add prerecorded bumpers (prerecorded video intros like your favorite TV shows for example) at the beginning and end of the live broadcast is really nice too.  We haven’t done this yet but you can bet I’m looking for ways to use all of these tools to create new content for us on Facebook as well as for my social media clients.  For those of you who tune in to our Periscope broadcasts don’t worry, there are NO plans to move the Doug & Ally Morning Show to Facebook!  If you’re curious here is an article I wrote earlier this year that compares and contrasts the two platforms which is still pretty on point – there have been a few changes since then obviously, but the basics remain the same.

A Couple of SEO thoughts…

I’m no expert when it comes to SEO but I have a basic working understanding of it.  By using plugins like Yoast here for WordPress I’ve been able to properly place my content on the Internet so that it ranks well in search results on Google in our home base of West Bloomfield for example.  Now, some might say one of the flaws in our SEO strategy is that we cast too wide a net which doesn’t allow us to dominate a niche and the people we snag aren’t as targeted as they could be.  We are a high end / low volume photography studio.  It’s just me and Ally and we put a ton of effort, heart and soul into every client and every portrait session.  We bring a ton of experience and expertise to the table.  We aren’t for everybody – we aren’t a cheap studio, don’t want to be, and yet we rank for plenty of general searches such as “West Bloomfield Photographer” which doesn’t discriminate between different tastes or budgets.

Facebook Creator

So what’s the answer?  As I said I’m not an expert and I’m not ready to cast a smaller more targeted net on the web for “higher end” clients only – I’m not even sure there’s a way to do that – to only get ranked for clients who want the “best experience”…  I think I’m good with how we present and differentiate ourselves online with social media and our owned online assets.  I say for SEO just make sure you’re found first and foremost as a general rule and then make sure people can tell that you are a quality outfit when they find you.  In the meantime though here’s my advice if your net is a little on the wide side:

I had someone call asking about pricing for a portrait session the other day.  I talked him briefly through the process and the pricing and we were way out of the budget he was looking for – he wanted something really simple.  Instead of turning my nose up at him I helped him through his options and what the differences are, and ultimately referred him to Focal Point in Farmington.  They are a higher volume studio than us with a large staff and more basic options available.  It won’t be the same experience as working with us but this guy wasn’t looking for the “best” – he was just looking for something “good” and economical.  Nothing wrong with that.  Focal Point been good to work with for us with seniors for class composites, they are a local family owned studio, and I still helped this gentleman – I’m comfortable sending him there because they are a professional outfit.  The ease of entry has allowed too many non-professionals into this industry so I want to support actual studios.  You uplift your profession, you play nicely in the sandbox and if you are in the business of helping people then do it wherever you can whether someone becomes your client or not.  It’s good karma.

What are your thoughts on these topics?  Are you using Facebook Creator yet?  Have a good SEO take?  Let me know!

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Frameable Faces Photography
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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
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Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
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Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

Is Organic Reach Dead On Facebook? Is This A Legit Question?

Organic Reach

Is organic reach dead on Facebook?  Do you have to spend advertising dollars to reach anyone on Facebook now?  I hear people say this more and more….  As I’ve written here before I participate weekly in a live Twitter chat and broadcast on Periscope called #LetsLivestream.  It’s always a good discussion with many great guests and nice production value hosted by Jonathan Tripp, and once in a while a topic or a take in the conversation gets me thinking about a blog post.  This week the topic was promotion of your live streams – best practices for promoting, various tools etc.  Question 4 is the one that got me going:

Organic Reach

Here was my answer:

Organic Reach

A bit of a contrarian view perhaps (Wait – MOI?  A contrarian view?), and even though I referenced Periscope in my tweet (keep in mind the livestream takes place ON Periscope), I continued on to include Facebook Live in my point in the chat.  At that point my esteemed friend Jenn Nelson of @JennsLIVE & @WineAntics who helps produce the show chimed in with the comment “ORGANIC REACH IS DEAD ON FACEBOOK!!!”  And then this happened:

Organic ReachOrganic ReachOrganic ReachOrganic Reach

This was going nowhere.  We agreed to continue the discussion offline after the show which we did.

So Is Organic Reach Indeed Dead On Facebook?

I sent her these screen shots of recent analytics for our Facebook page with the organic reach numbers – these represent all the posts we made on the Frameable Faces page from 10/3/17 to 11/14/17:

Organic Reach

Note that as of this writing we have a TOTAL of 1792 followers of our page.  You too can be a follower!  Give us a “Like”!!!  Okay sorry that was very shameless and spammy.  I digress.  But the point is you’ll note in the numbers above that virtually ALL of our reach has been non-paid.  There is one sliver of darker orange that represents a bit of boosted / paid reach when we spent a couple dollars to get one post going a little.  In this snapshot of time the reach on our posts range anywhere from 188 at the lowest to 2.6k at the highest and roughly half of these were Livestreams.  The livestreams didn’t have the peaks and valleys that the other posts did, generally ranging between a more consistent 500-1000.  Meanwhile, YES – we still get plenty of organic reach and a handful of posts still go beyond the followers of our page without paying on Facebook!

Is This Even A Legit Question?

Now here is where the debate gets interesting.  Jenn’s point which is shared by many is that Facebook doesn’t just automatically dole out free reach for your business page anymore.  And she’s right to a point.  Little by little Facebook has pulled back on how much they’ll push your content out to your followers, and many feel like it’s become closer and closer to a full on pay-to-play model to get any reach.  Each time the announcement / rumor comes out that they’ve tweaked the algorithm again my response is the very same every time:  Crappy content continues to get less organic reach on #Facebook. Good content still gets plenty. frameablefaces.com/2017-11-16-organic-reach-dead-facebook/ Click To Tweet

So my question is what IS organic reach?  See the following conversation between Jenn and me:

Organic ReachOrganic Reach

How great is Jenn?  Give her a like / follow!  But here’s the question (to her point), a typical post of hers might only reach 40 people on Facebook on its own.  That’s what Facebook is just handing her out of the gate.  I would still argue that that is still not purely an automatic just because she posted – those 40 people on some level have to be 1) followers that have 2) likely shown some affinity towards her page through their Facebook behavior.  Now once someone shares it it may bump right up to 200 and so on.  Isn’t that STILL “organic”?  In other words, good content that compels people to share will still gain reach organically.  If that’s not still considered organic then what’s the point of even talking about “organic reach”?  As I said to Jenn what’s the point of even creating content in the first place if no one is going to share it?  If a post falls in the Facebook Forest and no one sees it did it really happen?  Shares, likes, comments – engagement – is part of the deal with organic.  That’s the reason we do this in the first place.

Which brings us back to the same old tried and true principle of Facebook and ALL social media in general.  Make sure you are entertaining, teaching, engaging – providing value with good content and you will still get that organic reach!!!!  I created this meme a while back as kind of my favorite quote for small businesses – kind of my little calling card….  follow this and yes – there is still organic reach to be had everywhere on social media.  Even on Facebook.

Organic Reach

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Frameable Faces Photography
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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

How Important Should Analytics Be To Your LiveStreaming Strategy?

Analytics

An exchange I had on twitter yesterday got me thinking…   Of course I often go to football for analogies because I have a background there, so as a former player and a football “purist” I may enjoy comparing statistics for fun, but I would never play “fantasy football”.  I never have and never will.  I actually like statistics – I do.  I’ll even use them from time to time in debates about teams and players and who was better.  However, analysis can cause paralysis and “fantasy football” takes analysis (and analytics) to the point where the appeal and the game of “fantasy football” itself actually has little to do with the team sport of football. 

Meanwhile I participate in a live twitter chat and Livestream every Wednesday at 3PM EST called #LetsLivestream which you can tune into on Periscope at http://pscp.tv/letslivestream/.  This week the topic was centered around favorite Livestream apps and one of the questions was as follows:

Analytics

If you aren’t quite sure what a twitter chat is, it’s where a meeting, presentation, or just a conversation centers around questions on a topic that are put out to the group with a selected hashtag and the questions are tweeted out as “Q1” etc. as you see above.  You then can jump in the conversation by using the hashtag and answering the question with an “A1” etc.  My off-the-cuff answer to this question was “A6 Important yes – they don’t DICTATE a TON of what we do per se for LIVE, but we definitely use them  As a side note Eggdrp and FullScope are the two main websites we use to grab our analytics for our Periscope broadcasts.  Facebook Live and YouTube provide plenty on their own.

At this point an exchange ensued where a Canadian Livestreaming company named Livescale chimed in and replied to my tweet stressing the importance of analytics – that’s one of the great things about a twitter chat – you meet people and have conversations around a shared interest – twitter should be SOCIAL!  Don’t forget that.  But the exchange got me thinking as you can see by my reply:

Analytics

How Important Should Analytics Be?

My reply is a perfect lead in to the football analogy.  See here is the thing…  Analytics – statistics – data – numbers that tell you how many viewers you had watching on a broadcast, how many comments they made, how long they watched for, how many times they shared in the app or on other platforms, how many times they took screenshots or gave other feedback like hearts on Periscope – all these numbers can give you an idea of how successful the broadcast was depending on your goals.  They can tell you what your growth looks like over time and give you endless ways to measure how you’re doing.  Livescale isn’t wrong.  These numbers are indeed important.  For example, Tom Brady (another #10 at Michigan after me – ha) is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game of football, and as a quarterback he is responsible for commanding the offense down the field to score more points than the other team to win games.  He handles the ball on every offensive play and if you look at his statistics they tell the story of a guy who yes, would be considered at the top based on the numbers:

Tons of statistics there – he’s thrown for over 61 thousand yards and over 450 touchdowns.  The numbers dotting his career in bold indicate statistics where he was number one in the NFL in that statistic.  These are just regular season statistics – he’s also been the winning Super Bowl QB more than anyone in history.  The data goes on and on, and these statistics / analytics tell the story of success on a massive scale.

Now let’s look at Larry Allen….

Analytics

In my opinion Larry Allen was the most dominant offensive lineman to ever play.  As a Dallas Cowboys fan I probably watched Larry Allen in around 140-ish of the 176 games he played for Dallas (on TV) and he was a beast.  Strong, massive, quick, nasty – a first ballot Hall of Famer.  And just look at those stats….  Wait what?  You see, while his coaches may have been breaking down his game films and grading him out on his performances, the only official statistics for Larry are the 4 fumbles that happened nearby him on the field that he was able to recover over the course of his career.  As an offensive lineman Larry may have never touched the ball aside from those 4 times in 14 years.  So how do we know Larry was successful?  Because we were there watching Larry – watching him move, neutralize and flatten defenders one after the other.  There are no official statistics for what Larry did and it doesn’t matter.  Statistics DON’T tell the story in this case.  

It’s not all that different in Livestreaming.  Analytics don’t always tell the whole story.  Sure they are important and shouldn’t be ignored.  However if only 10 people watched your broadcast but it changed their outlook, started a relationship or converted a client then it may have been a more successful broadcast than if 500 people were there live and none of that happened.  If one person watching your broadcast made a comment that opened your eyes to a new way of thinking that’s better than 578 comments of nonsense because you’re broadcasting drama that attracts people like a train wreck and you’re not even looking at the comments because you’re so wrapped up in your own…..drama… 

The same goes for all social media – build your community organically and yes track your analytics.  Watch for trends and try to track towards your goals.  But make sure you focus on your relationships and the vibe and culture around your brand, your broadcasts and your content as a whole.  Be true to that and then the analytics – while they are important – won’t be the only thing that tells your story, and they shouldn’t be.

BECOME A PATRON!  Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!  
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Frameable Faces Photography
**********************************************
Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
************************************************
Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
************************************************
***************************************­*******
Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!