We recently connected with Emma Lulloff and have shared our conversation below.

Emma, appreciate you joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?

Social media has been something that has been an extremely crucial part of my business. I personally feel in todays day and age it is hard to run a business without the help of social media. With that comes a lot of time and effort into these social media platforms. I am lucky enough to have a sister who is a social media manager, so she helps me out in the social media department. I create all of my own content, do my own content research, and come up with my own content ideas, but she is my behind the scenes recorder, and multi platform poster. Typically my process is to batch 5-7 reels one day a week, I post them to instagram with the caption that I have come up with, and then she copies those videos over to tik tok for me. I have found it extremely beneficial to put my effort into the one social media platform that I enjoy the most, and have learned the most (Instagram), and then delegate out the others that don’t spark my interest as much (tik tok and facebook).

I made the choice to do this because the time it took me to download my reels, copy my caption, and repost it to other social medias was not worth spending time on. I found myself not being as consistent with the other social media platforms like I can be when she is helping me. My results haven’t been crazy, but my tik tok has grown a few hundred followers since she started doing that about 2 months ago for me.

My biggest tip for new business owners is learn the ins and the outs of one social media platform to start, and then branch off to others. I knew that I LOVED Instagram, and she was more of a tik tok girl, so it worked out overall.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was always a go getter since the time I was in high school. I was one of the lucky (or not so lucky) people who had Covid completely wipe out my junior and senior year, which a lot of people were very bummed about, but it actually benefited me. I decided to go entirely virtual for the rest of my junior year and all of my senior year, which lead me to be able to start working full time at my job which was at a bank at the time. I worked full time for about 8 months, graduated in January (which was a semester early), started college at LTC for business right away in January, and then bought my first home on my 18th birthday in February! Ever since I was about 13 I loved taking photos, and I had a camera way back when I was maybe 13/14 but decided to sell it to earn some extra money for my first car. It was after about a year of owning our house that I decided I really wanted to start taking photos again, so I invested in a camera and a lens, and jumped right into it. My first year was pretty slow, I shot a lot of sessions for free to just build my portfolio, and then spring of 2023 is when my business really started to take off. I was almost fully booked for the year pretty early on, so I decided to make the move to full time business owner in July of 2023. It was scary but one of the best decisions I’ve ever done. I am now able to serve my clientele much better, have a better overall client experience, and have a quicker turnaround time on my sessions. I have also just recently started offering education for other photographers as my social media (mainly Instagram) has been taking off and reaching a lot of other photographers. I love being inspired by other photographers, and I also love being able to inspire new photographers!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media is a topic that I am pretty passionate about, so much so I am releasing an Instagram growth course geared towards photographers soon!

I have been playing the social media game for a longgg time now, and my biggest piece of advice (as much as a lot of people don’t like to hear it) is staying consistent with content that is working for you. Like I mentioned, Instagram is more so my specialty, so I’ll mainly be referring to that, but I had been posting reels on Instagram for well over a year before any of them got any kind of decent traction. I remember my first video that got over 10k views and I was like OH MY GOD, this is the best thing ever, and now I’d say about 60-70% of my videos get well over 10k views. I’ve had one hit over a million views and quite a few over 100k views, but it takes consistency, and a LOT of analyzing what is working vs what isn’t. For me personally, I’ve noticed educational videos geared towards photographers do very well, as well as funny & relatable videos do pretty well for me.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Keeping in touch with my clients is one of my favorite things to do, especially the ones who have been there for me since absolute day one, and trusted me as I was learning everything. I post a ton on social media and I interact with almost everyone who comments or messages me, I also send flash sales to past clients just to show my appreciation for them and what they’ve done to support my business.

A lot of times if I am running any kind of model call, I will likely choose someone who has already had a paid session with me, and offer them a free session (in exchange for the model call), because to me that also just shows them how appreciative I am of them for trusting me to begin with.

The last thing I do which I felt just really shows clients how thankful I am for them was last year at the end of the year I sent out a Holiday card with a little note to all my clients thanking them for supporting me over the last year, and a 20% off booking coupon for the upcoming year, to keep that recurring clientele base.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.eba-photography.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/ebaphotographyy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ebaphotography22
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EBAPhotography