MeetHeads – Promoting my Business at a Tweetup

Twitter has increasingly become a key part of how I promote myself as a photographer (Find me @neilcreek). I stay on top of the latest photography news, I engage with fellow photographers, I promote my blog posts, but most importantly, I am able to forge connections to people in the real world. This became especially obvious to me several days ago when I attended a “tweetup” – twitter meet up.

“Tweetup Mellers” was organised by @sammutimer and was attended by approximately sixty twitter users from Melbourne, Australia. As always, I take my camera to such events, but I knew I wanted to do something a little more to promote myself as a professional photographer. These are a group of well-networked and highly influential people, including some of the most successful online “personalities” in Australia. If I could figure out a way to take advantage of this without being exploitative, it could be good for my reputation.

I discussed this with my friend and skilled networker @jadecraven and eventually I came up with the idea for “MeetHeads” – meet up head shots (click here to see the MeetHeads page). The idea is, I set up a tiny “studio” at the venue and offer to take anyone’s head shots for free. They are then allowed to use this photo online for any non-commercial purpose, such as a twitter avatar, facebook profile or whatever. In exchange they must credit me as the photographer wherever the image is used, and if possible link back to my site.

Here are the photos I took on the night:

Throughout the night I had many people complement me on the idea and the name, which everyone seemed to love. Over the next several days, after I had uploaded and linked to the photos, several people started using my photos of themselves as their avatars on Twitter. Australia’s most successful blogger Darren Rowse is even using my photo for his new @probloggerdeals twitter account and on every post of his new darrenrowse.com personal blog!

Best of all, in the last two weeks, I have attracted three new bookings for my services through connections made via Twitter!

I will continue to take MeetHeads at future twitter meets, and if you live in Melbourne and use Twitter, I encourage you to come along to the next tweetup and get a free MeetHead! You can find out about the meets here.