Category: Random

Tips, Ideas, and Facts About Instagram’s New Carousel Feature – Friendors Consultancy

Hey there, Friendors!

We’re sure you’ve seen the new Instagram update, where you can now upload more than one image and your viewers can swipe to see more. It’s officially called carousel posts but we’re calling the feature SWIPE. It was originally only available to advertisers but Instagram just rolled the feature out to all users.

We are in loooove with it and wanted to share some tips and advice for when to use it and some links to help get your groove goin’. Let’s get started!

FACTS:

  • You are now allowed 10 images in one post. That’s soooo many!
  • You can post photos and videos together.
  • All likes and comments apply to one post

WHEN TO USE SWIPE:

  • Listacles: Swipe is perfect for listacles. Here are a few examples to get your brain rolling with more ideas: 10 Bridal Hairstyles We Love, 5 Flowers In Season For Fall Events, 7 Times The Flower Girl Stole The Show, etc.
  • To Prevent Spamming: You know when you get in that mood and you want to share like a billion photos in one day? Or when your company is at more than one event a day and you want to show everyone? It’s kind of annoying to spam with a photo from each of your events in one day. Now, you can put them together and say something along the lines of “We’re out working at 7 events today – swipe to see a peek into each one!”
  • BTS: Behind the scenes photos are fun and everyone wants to see them, but they should not be the main attraction of your instagram Share BTS images once or twice a week in Swipe format so your feed is full of finished product posts and just a few sprinkles of BTS. You could even post the final product as the first image in your carousel and then say “swipe left for bts to see how we got this photo!” or “swipe to see our team dancing in the kitchen while making this delicious pie for today’s event” or something.
  • How To’s: Everyone loves a little how to, especially when it’s helpful to them. Here are a few ideas: How To Hold Your Bouquet For Photos, How To Tie Your Bow Tie, etc.
  • To Tell A Story That’s Too Important For Stories: Stories are popular right now but what if you want to tell a story that’s too important to disappear in 24 hours? Instagram’s got ya now.

TIPS:

  • This new feature automatically crops each image square. Make sure you are choosing images that are good compositions for squares and that you’re not cropping your or photographer’s images poorly.
  • Don’t forget to tag each photo individually! Even though likes and comments apply to one post only, you can and should tag each image individually.
  • Post photos and videos together in one swipe post!

LEARN MORE WITH THESE LINKS WE FOUND:

3 DJ Pet Peeves (Avoid these, Friendors!)

We think it’s important that our industry’s creative souls work harmoniously together but sometimes that’s tough when we don’t understand the other people we are working around, so we’re doing a series that began with Wedding Planner Pet Peeves and now we’re on DJ Pet Peeves.

Here are 3 things we notice happening to DJs a lot that maybe we should take note of to avoid.

  1. Putting your equipment in their space. We see it so often. A photographer or other professional arrives to an event and immediately walks over to the DJ space and puts all of their things by their table. Unless you work with the DJ regularly, we say this is a big no no. Don’t steal the personal space that was allotted to them for the event – ask the coordinator where you should put your things down.
  2. A planner or coordinator leaving halfway through a reception without letting the DJ know. We see so many DJs looking around for the coordinator/event planner during the reception to talk schedule and inform them that the bouquet toss is about to be announced only to be running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off because surprise – the coordinator left early and only told the photographer bye. If you’re a coordinator, the DJs care about you and look to you during the event to make sure they are doing what you want; don’t leave ’em hanging without a goodbye.
  3. Putting a drink on their table. Just don’t.

Overall, we think everyone always works together really well no matter circumstances – we’re in a beautiful industry, but we always know it best to share feelings. So, what’s next?

4 Wedding Planner Pet Peeves – Friendors Consultancy

Our industry is full of so many different talents – musicians, florists, photographers, designers, planners, etc, and we each are so into our specific art in the event industry that sometimes we may not think about the other professionals we’re working alongside and how their experience might be entirely different than ours. The florist may not be thinking about the DJs job and the DJ might not even make small talk with the caterers in order to know their struggles and triumphs. Of course we all work together but we don’t work together in a traditional sense – which means we may not entirely understand each other’s art.

Since there’s a little wall there, we’re here to share some insights into each specific vendors world – their pet peeves, and we are starting with Wedding Planners.

Here are 4 Pet Peeves of wedding planners.

1. When you don’t reply within 24 hours. Wedding planners know that however you treat them is how you are going to treat their clients they send to you. When you don’t reply immediately or take more than 24 business hours to get back to them, you’re losing brownie points and most likely a lot of business. They want to reply to their clients right away so reply to them right away.

2. Ignoring the schedule. Wedding planners and coordinators spend tremendous amounts of time on the day of schedule – don’t decide to make changes yourself or that you’re just not going to look at it (skimming it once doesn’t count). Don’t extend bridal portraits into the beginning of dinner or hair and makeup into the first look time. Just like…don’t.

3. When you don’t credit them in your posts. Wedding planners are so often left behind when it comes to crediting the talent on social platforms. The makeup artist will tag the photographer and florist, the venue will tag the caterer and designer, and the photographer will tag the clients. Somehow the wedding planner gets lost in that shuffle. Make sure you tag the planner in every post from the wedding. Every post. The day wouldn’t be smooth without them so do your due diligence in crediting where credit is due.

4. When you drink on the job. This should be a no brainer but for some reason we still have to include this one. We see it way too often and so do planners and it peeves them. Oh, it really peeves them.

Coming soon, 3 DJ Pet Peeves.

Florists, do you have any pet peeves? How about you, Venue Owners?

Reach out to share your experiences with us. Schellie@FarOutGalaxy.com

Happy MLK Day!

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and we are spending our day loving our fellow men.

Back soon!

How To Book ‘Em Without Meeting – Friendors Consultancy

It’s a dream of all of ours to just sit at our office desk and have phone calls pour in by the hundreds giving us deposits to book their day on our calendar. The only problem is that our brands aren’t large enough to be that well trusted. We’re here to share some tips on how to book clients over the phone.

  • Make sure your website is always up to par. They won’t trust you if your site sucks (to be frank).
  • Remember that you go past your own site. Make sure you have a presence on other websites – blogs, vendors you’ve worked with, etc. When they Google your company and your name (which they will) it’s awesome if they find other credible sites talking about and linking back to you.
  • You have to have social profiles for your company. If they are on your website and begin to look for your social accounts (instagram, facebook, etc) and you don’t have valuable and consistent content on there (or the profiles don’t exist at all) that causes the lead to wonder if you even exist which means it’s time for a meeting!
  • Have tons of reviews readily available online. If you have reviews online, that places you as a trustworthy professional for their event.
  • Send them absolutely everything they need before booking – your investment info, special links to events you’ve done at their venue, links to reviews, links to photos similar to what they are asking for (pink flowers? put together an email with 10 links to pink flowers you’ve done!). If you provide them with everything they need to make their decision they usually make it remotely – no meeting necessary.

The secret to booking without meeting is really to just be an established and well trusted brand online – on your site and other peoples sites. That takes a really long time to build up but is something we should constantly be working towards.

More tips to come soon!

5 Things To Do Before Purchasing Your Wedding Dress

Hi! Six Hearts Photography here!

We’re sure you’ve seen a bajillion posts on how to find the best wedding dress for you – how to decide which shade of White, how to budget, knowing your dress code, how to discover your body shape, yadda yadda yadda. Well, we’re here to give you just a little bit of advice from a photographers perspective. Now, we’re no professional fashionistas, dress designers, or shop owners, so take us at face value, but hey, we think we’ve got some good opinions.

Before you buy your wedding outfit:

1. Sit down in your dress. Just for a little while. How do you feel?

2. Try on undergarments with the dress, preferably the ones you plan on wearing. You have no idea how many bras we see poking out of wedding dresses. Like, 1 out of every 15.

3. Wear it for a while before purchasing – walk around the store. Are you comfortable?

4. Know what you’re going for but follow your heart. Corny, right?

5. Know that you totally don’t even have to get a traditional wedding dress. Like, seriously. You want a pink jumpsuit instead? DO IT. Same rules apply.

Share this with your engaged girlfriends!

Instagram Updates We Love – Friendors Consultancy

Instagram just swept in and made a few updates and we’re here to share How To’s on two of the features that we’ve been utilizing on the platform.

1. You can now save posts for viewing later.

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Say you come across a post that you love and want to save for later. Now, just like on Facebook, Instagram has a “Saved” tab so you can do that.

You’ll notice the feature beneath the right corner of the image – a little icon that looks like a bookmark. Just tap that and you’ll notice the photo appear at the bottom of your window and the bookmark icon is now black to show it’s saved.

How do you access Saved posts later?

To access saved posts, you go to your profile and you’ll notice the bookmark icon is now next to the photos of you icon. Click it and waluh.

2. Profile tags in Stories are clickable now.

Instagram now allows clickable tags in their Stories section of the platform.

Just begin posting a story like normal. Type @username (just like with a profile post) and click their profile when it appears in the pop up options of users. Tapping the profile makes the @username underlined – that’s how you know it’s tagged.

If you do not click the user when it appears as an option and the underline does not appear then your tag isn’t being applied.

Post your story.

Since you’ve made your tag clickable, your viewers can now click it and navigate to that users profile – making the story a whole lot more interactive, effective, and user friendly.

See?

 

If you have any questions or need help with anything, reach out anytime to schellie@faroutgalaxy.com

 

XOXO

 

An Online Review Tip You May Not Know – Friendors Consultancy

With a world where buying decisions about weddings are made mostly off your internet presence, we all know how important reviews are, but have we been doing them wrong?

There are soooo many sites to get reviews on – The Knot, WeddingWire, Facebook, and more. How do you choose which to focus on? Do you do them all?

We used to think “oh, this Facebook review we just got is so sweet! I wonder if they would put this on WeddingWire too?!” and then we’d ask and they always would. They would simply copy and paste. No problem, right?

Well, we’re here with a tip and something you might not know.

Google does not like the same reviews pasted across your different profiles. They look at that as you trying to trick the system, as repetitive content that can’t be trusted, and it actually counts against you with their SEO.

Our tip is to choose one site and focus on it. Your clients will notice that’s where you collect and Google shall reward. 😉

A Really Cool Instagram Planner – Friendors Consultancy

You may remember when we shared a few Social Media Planning Tools with you all, like Hootsuite and Later, and when we elaborated on How We Make Our Instagram Cohesive, but we’re here with a new app we’ve discovered that we really think tops the cake. (is that a saying?)

If you haven’t heard of this app, you’ll be thanking us from the bottom pits of your heart for forever after you try it out.

It tells you the best hashtags, the best times, allows you to schedule posts, and to even drag and drop your images in a predicted grid view on your phone so you can match them up cohesively before posting. The other apps we’ve blogged about in the past have some of these functionalities as well but this one’s user friendliness and variety won us over.

It’s free up until you meet the number of free grids and free uploads you’re allowed in the free plan. For just 2.99 –  4.99 a month you could be rolling in all of the features. (we are!)

You ready for us to finally tell you the name of it?

It’s called Unum.

Click here to download!