I’ve noticed something about social media recently. You can follow a business for months and, from the outside, everything appears to be going brilliantly. They’re posting regularly, sharing new work and showing photographs of meetings, events and happy customers. Then one day you hear that the business has closed and think, “I didn’t see that coming.” But why would you?
It made me think about my own job as a photographer. When I photograph someone, I might take hundreds of photographs, but I certainly don’t show them every single one. There will be photographs where they blinked, their expression wasn’t quite right, I caught them between poses or perhaps there’s absolutely nothing technically wrong with the photograph but another one is simply better.
Those photographs don’t make the final selection. I choose the strongest images, edit them and deliver the photographs that represent my best work. That isn’t being dishonest. It’s simply part of being a photographer, and when you think about it, businesses are doing something very similar on social media.
We’re seeing the selects
Most businesses aren’t going to announce every difficult week. They probably won’t tell us when enquiries have dried up, when a quote has been rejected or when they’re worried about where next month’s work is coming from. Instead, they’ll talk about the customer they did win, the event they attended, the project they completed or the positive feedback they received.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Social media is part of their marketing, so naturally they’re going to present their business in the best possible light. The problem comes when the rest of us forget that we’re only seeing a selection.
Comparing your contact sheet with somebody else’s final edit
Running my own business means I see everything that happens in it. I know when my diary has gaps, when an enquiry doesn’t turn into a booking and when I send a quote that doesn’t get accepted. I know what money is coming in, what’s going out and when things are quieter than I’d like them to be.
Then I can open LinkedIn or Instagram and see somebody else apparently doing brilliantly. They’ve landed another client, completed another big project or attended another fantastic meeting. It’s incredibly easy to look at that and wonder what you’re doing wrong.
But there’s a flaw in that comparison. I’m comparing everything I know about my own business with a carefully selected glimpse of somebody else’s. In photography terms, I’m comparing my entire contact sheet with their finished portfolio.
That doesn’t mean social media is fake
I don’t think businesses should suddenly start publishing every problem they encounter in the name of being authentic. There are plenty of things that quite rightly remain private, and marketing has always involved deciding what you want potential customers to see.
A restaurant uses photographs of its best dishes. A hotel shows its most attractive rooms. I put my strongest portraits on my website rather than every photograph I’ve ever taken. None of that is dishonest. There is a big difference between selecting the strongest parts of reality and inventing a reality that doesn’t exist.
Perhaps, then, the lesson isn’t that we should distrust everything we see on social media. It’s that we shouldn’t use somebody else’s social media presence as a reliable measure of how well their business is doing, particularly when comparing it with our own.
Behind every polished business page is a much bigger contact sheet that we’ll probably never see. It contains successes and failures, busy periods and quiet ones, good decisions and bad ones. That’s simply what running a business looks like.
And perhaps that’s worth remembering the next time somebody else’s business appears to be doing perfectly online. We’re looking at their selects, not their entire shoot.
Ray
