Instagram Best Practices: Grow Your Community, Work with Brands | Tyson Wheatley | Skillshare
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Instagram Best Practices: Grow Your Community, Work with Brands

teacher avatar Tyson Wheatley, Photographer, Journalist, Dad

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:12

    • 2.

      Posting Tips and Best Practices

      7:58

    • 3.

      Building Community Around a Theme

      1:45

    • 4.

      Instagram Editing Tools

      2:56

    • 5.

      Editing in Priime App

      3:53

    • 6.

      Instagram Sister Apps: Layout and Boomerang

      2:51

    • 7.

      Growing Your Personal Brand Outside of Instagram

      3:33

    • 8.

      Instagramming for Brands

      10:44

    • 9.

      Thank You

      0:48

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About This Class

Want to turn your social media hobby into a full-fledged career?

Join photographer and strategist Tyson Wheatley for an insightful 35-minute class onĀ building your brand on Instagram, telling real stories, and creating compellingĀ workĀ for other brands.

Key lessons include:

  • tips and strategy on posting and interacting
  • how to tell an authentic story with your images
  • latest Instagram Tools and editing apps
  • growing your personal brand outside of Instagram
  • best practicesĀ for working with brands and clients

If you're among the 15,000+ students who've loved Tyson's other Skillshare classes, you know he'sĀ built a lifestyle around Instagramming for brands. In this class, he breaks down clearly and honestly how you too canĀ master InstagramĀ for both yourself and clients.

Meet Your Teacher

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Tyson Wheatley

Photographer, Journalist, Dad

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Tyson Wheatley and I am a commercial photographer based in New York and Hong Kong. Basically, I make Instagrams for a living. I take photos as a photographer. I also help a lot of brands and clients that I work for create great content that they can put on their Instagram feed. The skills that we're going to cover in this class, how do I make your content really stand out on Instagram? We're going to go over the latest editing tools that are available. I'm going to share some of my own strategy with you on your Instagram feed and community. Also, I'm going to share some of my secrets with working with brands and clients. I also travel a great deal, so for me, the challenge is always when you get to a new place, how do you tell that story in a unique way? That will be a big theme about what we talk about in this class. So your assignment is to tackle kind of a very well-documented image and put a new twist on it, put your own signature on this photo. So in this class, we're going to build on the foundation from the previous one and hopefully help you take your Instagram to the next level 2. Posting Tips and Best Practices: Okay, now, we want to spend or I want to spend some time talking about posting strategy or just strategy in general about your Instagram feed and how you can be successful on Instagram. So, let's talk about strategy and let's start first with my favorite thing, which is storytelling. I thought a great way to do this would be to take a look at my good friend, Theron, and his dog, Maddie as an example. So, you may already follow them on Instagram, hopefully you do at this wild idea. So, Theron Humphrey is the photographer, and his companion, his road companion is Maddie, she's a coonhound. Together, they've been on adventure for the last few years. The story that's being told there is a compelling one, and it's one that you can relate with and you can understand very easily as soon as you get there. That's something that's pretty rare on Instagram, but you'll notice that the people that are really killing it on Instagram and doing well are ones that are able to convey some kind of story pretty easily. There's always going to be a challenge to get people to come to your feed and see your feed. But let's cover that, let's just put that aside for now and let's just think about what happens when people come to your feed? There is going to be a very quick decision that's made probably in a matter of seconds, and it's going to be main and probably the first 6-8 photos that people see. I'll say consistency is very important, and as it applies to tone and color palette and style, if that is all consistent, it's going to be a lot easier for someone to see that quickly and make this quick decision of, "Yes, I want to follow this story. I want to follow along. This compels me or I want to dive deeper." Another thing we want to talk about is, what time to post, right? When should you post to your Instagram? There are some tools out there to help you. One of them is called Iconosquare. Essentially, it's a web-based tool that you can do a variety of things. You can sign up for an Iconosquare account and it will allow you to like and leave comments on Instagram as if you were on your mobile device using Instagram. But the important thing that they have is they have some analytics that you can use. The most interesting thing for me at least, it will tell you basically when your followers are most active on the platform and it will put it in the context of your own posting habits and it puts it on a grid, so it essentially shows you when the optimal time would be to post, right? So, based on the activity of your followers, when will be the right time to post? For me, for instance, 9:30 on most weeknights is a good time for me to post except on Saturday night. That's not a good time for me to post at 9:30. There is another tool that is very helpful to use. This is an app that you can put on your phone. It's called Social Blade. Social Blade is very simply, it will give you the analytics on how you're doing, how your follower and like and comment, basically, how your engagement is doing and this is an important thing to monitor as you go. The one caveat I want to put here is that I'm not really interested in teaching a class on how to be successful on Instagram in that regard in terms of, how do I get the most likes? How do I get the most followers? That is potentially very important to you if that is your goal or this is the thing, but that's not really what I'm interested in and that's not really what I'm teaching here. When I'm talking about being successful, I mean it in the context of you're creating interesting content that people can engage with and you can grow an audience around a storytelling. So, they can be totally related. You can do those things and you can grow your audience and you can get more likes and you can be successful. But there are some other things that you can do that can generate likes that don't really involve any of those things. Consistency, we've covered, very important. The other one is authenticity, right? What does that mean? I don't know. For me, authenticity just means it feels real, it doesn't feel forced, it doesn't feel fake, it just feels like something that would naturally happen. In the context of this class, right? The one thing I'm challenging everyone to do is to try to do something that is, push yourself a little bit and try something that is generally new, right? So, there are images that have jumped the shark, so to speak, right? And what am I talking about? I'm talking about, I don't know, you've seen someone put their feet out of a helicopter or maybe standing on the ledge of a building, or certainly you've seen someone standing on a rock and that rock is in front of a lake and the reflection of a lake and they have a pendleton blanket around them, wrapped around them. It's the kind of thing that Socality Barbie did a great job of imitating and satirizing. It's easy to imitate popular things on Instagram and you can probably grow your audience by doing that certainly. But I think you want to ask yourself, what's the end goal here? Is your goal to be popular or is it to have a big account? I mean you can copy ideas and you can get away with it. If your end goal is to be commercially successful, I would encourage you rather than imitating and stealing, I would say, to try and distinguish yourself as a unique individual because in the end of the day, brands and anyone that's going to pay you to take photographs is going to be much more interested in working with someone that can create a unique image, that is also technically beautiful and all those things that go into the basics of photography. Overwhelmingly, the community on Instagram is positive, at least, that's been my experience. So, that is something that you should jump into and foster and be an advantage of and I guess what I mean just in its most basic form is to always stay positive. Your caption should be positive. The message that you're sharing should be positive. When you are leaving comments or you're interacting with other people's, I would say, just in general, my advice to you is just to keep it really positive. Either you're a half glass full or half glass empty person and the vibe on Instagram is definitely half glass full. So, this may sound obvious, but comments are a million times better than a like. If you think about it this way, if you leave a comment on someone's Instagram, you're going to generate a direct link to your profile in that comment thread. So, you have the opportunity not just for the person whose Instagram photo you're commenting on, but also anybody else that's looking at through that comment thread can will maybe also notice your comment. So, when you think about it in that context, you want to leave a very thoughtful comment. It's awesome to say "Awesome" or "Cool" or "Nice shot" or "Good". But if your strategy is to get people to check out the work you're doing, then you want to invest in a really nice and thoughtful comment. It can be a comment on the photo itself, right? A comment about the lighting, for instance, or the composition. You can reference something about the location, maybe it's a place that you've been to before. You could share memory related to that. I read all the comments that people leave but when it's a thoughtful question, I'm much more compelled to go and check out their feed. If I have time, I don't spend all my time on my phone, surprise, surprise, but I do read all the comments. I will typically not respond to everything that's being said, right? I' don't necessarily feel compelled to respond to the comment, "Cool". But if you ask a question, if someone asks a question on my feed, I almost always will answer it or try to answer it or go look up the answer if I don't have it. So, I would just think that that's just general good practice. 3. Building Community Around a Theme: The other cool thing about Instagram is there's opportunities to build a community around a theme. So, this could be the community that you build around your own Instagram feed. Ideally, that's what you're trying to do when you're trying to tell a story. But there is a ways to do it that don't necessarily involve you specifically, so I'll give you two cool examples. My buddy Dirk Dallas, he's dirka on Instagram, but he's started another feed called fromwhereIdrone, and this is a community of other photographers that are all doing drone photography. He has curated an account around that experience, he's connected with other people and he said, "Hey, let's create an account where we can collectively put some of our best drone photography together." Even though dirka is really the only guy from that group that I know, I follow that account because I love drone photography and I want to be introduced to more of it and I want to see more examples of it. I've got another buddy here based in New York his name is Zach Houghton. He is a zachspassport on Instagram, but he also has created a separate community on travel called passionpassport, and this has been a very successful Instagram account. It's basically a community people that value travel and have a lot of travel images and want to contribute to it. So, think about that as a potential opportunity. You can build a community around a theme and get people together and you can lead that experience, and that can also turn into wonderful opportunities down the road to build out this brand that you're trying to build. 4. Instagram Editing Tools: We're going to look at some of the new ways that you can edit your images and some of the new tools that you have. For that, we're going to go with our iPhone screen cam. In the first class, Possibilities of Instagram, if you took that class, you know that we already covered some of the basics and the most important apps, and those still apply. The one that I mean by that are VSCO, Snapseed, Touch Retouch, I talked about Photoshop Express. Those are still the essentials, okay? But there is a new player to the game, it's called Prime, and it's right here. So, we're going to do a deeper dive into Prime, and if you want to know about those other ones, just go take the first class and you'll be all set. Let's start with Instagram itself. Let's start with Instagram tools itself. Two big differences right now on Instagram. One is that you'll notice that there's used to be all this square, and of course, now it is different. You can do landscape, and you can do portrait size. So, that just gives Instagram more flexibility in my mind but also gives you more flexibility when you go and capture images. So, you don't always have to be thinking about square when you post your images. However, when you're editing, you also need to be thinking, now it's also a new challenge to the editing because you have to think about, Am I creating a landscape image? Am I my doing a portrait size? Or am I going to do square. So, totally up to you on how you want to approach it, but now it's just a new thing to consider. So, let's talk about the tools itself on Instagram. So, here's a photo that we took earlier today. There are new filters, they're improved filters, they're not as harsh as they used to be in my opinion and I think therefore they're very good. Of course, the key takeaway is that there's the slider on any filter that you use on Instagram, and so that gives you a lot more flexibility on the amount of filter that you want to apply to your image. I don't know, somewhere in the middle is the part where I'm enjoying it right now. But if we push this button here on the right with the little tool symbol, you'll notice now that Instagram has all these new, a whole host of tools to use. Obviously, there's highlights and shadows, which are pretty standard in a lot of the apps that I mentioned in the first class. The truth is, really, you can spend a lot of time playing around with the Instagram tools itself and you can get close to where you want. I guess one of the thing to point out, one of the big differences in the new tools is their adjust bar, you can straighten horizontally. There's a lot of flexibility in how you can straighten your image. So, the straightening tool on Instagram is top notch, it's really great, it's a great improvement, a vast improvement for what they did have. 5. Editing in Priime App: I like to edit in a separate apps. If I'm going to edit mobile, I like to use, so my favorite thing right now is Prime. So let's go ahead and talk about Prime. So full disclosure, I have been collaborating with Prime. I have some styles I guess are filters for lack of a better word. I've developed some styles on Prime that you can use. Now, we're going to go into Prime, let's take a look at Prime. These are some of the photos that I shot today. These styles have all been developed by some pretty amazing photographers out in the field. This is one of my favorite, it's Cathedrals, it's where my friend Jessica Zullman who goes by J Zombie on Instagram. I find that the aesthetic of it is very, it just goes in tune with a lot of the things that I shoot. Good for interior design and architecture. So, since we shot that, since we were shooting in the Oculus, let's use her filter for this particular photo. So, you can adjust, again, this is similar to some of the other apps out there. You can sort of like Visko, and also the Instagram tools itself. There's an adjustment bar so you can sort of get to the right amount of what you want in terms of applying that style and the level of it. But then, there's also the contrast, the structure of brightness, warmth, tints, saturation, highlight, et cetera, et cetera. I tend to personally bring down the highlights a little bit with the shadows, I like to typically bring those down. I like to put the brightness up, and I like to bring the shadows down. I'm just playing around at this right now but I'm sort of getting to where I like it. The straightening tool on Prime I think is pretty excellent. So, when we're cropping again, I think in this case, you can do square one on one format like that. In the past, that's how we would edit for Instagram. But of course, now, we have a lot of different options. If you push it twice, it'll just change the length from horizontal to vertical. So I'm doing that. So in this case, I like this cropping tool alot because it allows me to see the rest of the space as I'm doing it live. Then, you can try it. If I don't like it, I just hit the crop tool again and it saves there. I really like this app. I really like the cropping part of it. Let's get it how we like it. How about rates? There. I don't know if I need to straighten it. Then I can finish it. What I love about this thing, I love this app tool is I can just save it and it'll save the actual image and it'll save it right to my camera roll. It'll replace the version that I had. If you don't want to do that, you can simply save a copy and it'll put it to the top of your queue. A copy, but it will keep the original that you're at. If at any point, you just press your finger down over the image, you will see where you were as opposed to where you are now in case you want to look again. Make anymore last minute decisions but I'm generally happy with that. I like it. I might actually bring up the contrast just a little bit. My buddy Maneil, has a good philosophy on this. He says that if it takes you, if you're really struggling and you're working, I think it's more than 10 minutes on an image and you just don't feel like it's right, he says scrap it, move onto another image. If that's a good sign that you just didn't. You didn't know all the original like, you just didn't get enough of the elements when you were originally wanting to do it. It's just a good sign. Like to move on. What I mean by that is maybe you just didn't have the right lighting or you just compositionally just didn't. You weren't hitting the sort of the right zone. So that is Prime app. 6. Instagram Sister Apps: Layout and Boomerang: Let's talk about some of the other Instagram apps that they've released in the last year. So, in fact, layout they've also you may have noticed in the most recent updates of Instagram. Layout has now been built right into Instagram itself. So with layout, essentially with layout is it just allows you to combine images. This, I guess the easiest way to say it. So, in this case, I just flipped an image for me. I find that it's just a fun tool that allows you to manipulate images. You can go, it's really easy, it's really intuitive. You can go back, you can mirror it, you can add more images to it, you can swap out one for another and you can also adjust the level of how you're going to do them. So, this one is really just about I would say this is a very fun way to experiment and play with some of your images. If you have something that you want to maybe do something that's a little more conceptual. Or if you want to combine different images in different ways, whatever it is this is a cool flexible tool that Instagram has built. It's super easy to use. Let's let's move on to another app. The most recent one that just came out is Boomerang. Boomerang I think is a real fun one to experiment with but essentially, what you're doing is you're creating, it's taking multiple exposures and it's creating an animated Gif which, Yahoo doesn't love animated Gif. So I'm going to push record, and I'm going then move my hand and you'll see that it's just captured this moment in time. It's just a fun thing to experiment. It's great for isolated movement. You'll notice that it's really beautiful. It's a great versatile cool if you want to capture a little bit of movement. It's not quite video, but it's not a still image either, it's somewhere in between. So, forefingers tap six times. One, two, three, four, five, six, and you can change the resolution, you can change the frame rate, and the frame count. Why is that cool? Well, you can do some pretty cool things if you adjust the frame rates. For instance, if you want to make someone jump in the air, you will be able to capture them. If you increase the frame rate rapidly, you can capture them in mid-air. If you do it, if you time it just right. If you choose as one of your class projects to do a Boomerang, definitely call me out in the comments section of this class and go check it out, because I'm really curious about how people are using this app. 7. Growing Your Personal Brand Outside of Instagram: Let's talk about building a community outside of Instagram, because you thought that all that you had to do is be good at Instagram, but that's no longer the case now. You have to do these other things, right? So, what am I talking about? Well, let's think about some of the opportunities there to grow your audience outside of Instagram. Let's talk about other social apps, Snapchat is one of them. So, Snapchat, for me, is all about behind the scenes, it's all about humor. It's a chance to share more of your personality. The stakes are very, very low on Snapchat because Snapchats don't last more than 24 hours. So, they're ephemeral and they're going to disappear. I've seen some interesting examples of people on Snapchat that are able to build an anticipation around what they're going to post to Instagram because they're showing these behind the scenes moments, these candid moments. Personally, I am really into this thing called Phhhoto right now. The word photo with three Hs. It's similar to Instagram's Boomerang, if you're familiar with that. So it creates animated GIFs. It basically takes like five photos in rapid succession. I like it too because you just use it on your phone, there's a built-in community there. I've connected with some people on Phhhoto that I didn't already follow on Instagram, and it's a nice way to branch out and meet some new people. Obviously, Twitter is a must have. For me, Twitter is a great way to follow other Instagrammers that you follow to see what's on their mind. That is a great platform for sharing what's got you upset or got you happy or has got you thinking. It's a great communication tool. Facebook, well, I guess the question here is, do you create a fan page for yourself? I just recently have done this myself and I think there's a lot of flexibility there. If you're going to create a Facebook fan page, I think the key is don't just repost your Instagrams there, do new edit or wider edit or post multiple photos from that shoot. But don't just post the same thing. That's kind of lazy and I think people will see right through that and they'll say, ''If I'm following your Facebook, why am I following you on Instagram if there's no additional value there?" The other thing is a Facebook fan page is a great place, it's a great tool if you're going to want to make some announcement like, "I have prints for sale." or "I'm working on a project that I'm excited about and I want feedback.", "I have a gallery show." et cetera. So, plus with a Facebook fan page, you can actually do some paid media behind it, try to reach people or reach a new audience that way. Should you have a Tumblr? Well, so you don't necessarily have to have a Tumblr. Tumblr is great, but you have to have a website. So there's, I guess, two things to talk about that, right? One is you can build your own website. I did mine through Squarespace. I did it because I didn't really have a budget to pay someone to build my website, so I wanted to do it myself and I found SquareSpace to be very easy and intuitive. But if you do just want to have like a free website that you can do, I would suggest getting a tumblr. Think about that as a great free website that you can use. Okay, those are some really easy tips for how to grow your own personal brand. The next thing we're going to talk about is what happens if you want to work with someone else's brand and how do you bring those things together. 8. Instagramming for Brands: Let's talk a little bit about working with brands, which of course like Instagram, has become an incredible platform for brands to connect with the same audiences that you yourself connect with on Instagram. It's a great place for brands to share their story. Then, it's become this amazing commercial opportunity for people like myself and people that you probably follow on Instagram. There's been a lot of opportunities in the last year and a half to work with brands. It's a new exciting area and some people are doing it really well. Some people aren't doing it really well. I've had great experiences. I've had some bad experiences. We're just going to do a brief overview of working with a brand. We'll start with the most important thing in my opinion which is, if you're going to do commercial work on Instagram, the most important thing is that it remains authentic. Authentic in this case, what I'm referring to, is authentic to your own feed. There's a lot of different ways to work with a brand. For example, like, if a fast food company asks you to hold up a taco or a hamburger on your feed but you normally, your feed is all about fitness and working out. It's obviously going to stand out and not feel authentic. People that follow you on Instagram they aren't stupid. They are going to see that a mile away and they're going to reject it, and they're going to hate it. It's not going to work out. It's not going to be good for you. It's not going to be good for the client. One other thing that I always try to educate anyone that I'm working with, any sort of working relationship, whether it's an agency or a brand is, I want to make sure right off the bat that they understand. A new work that I'm going to do on my Instagram feed, it's got to feel right for me. If you want to work with a brand, a couple of really important things. One is, you should probably follow that brand on Instagram. That might sound really obvious but it's important. Follow that brand that you like and love, and honestly, only follow brands that you like and love. So, it's keeping it real, keeping it authentic is important. Something else you can do is, you can DM them, follow on Instagram, DM that brand, introduce yourself. Basically, what you're looking for is you're trying to find a key person. If you're contacting the brand through DM, chances are you're going to either hit someone that works at an agency, that represents that brand, or you can be hitting someone that runs the social accounts of that brand. Essentially, what you want to do is introduce yourself and let it be known that you're interested in working and doing something cool on Instagram. From there, you want to put together an email. You probably want to put together a deck, it's always a smart idea. In the deck, what you don't want to do is give away an amazing idea to another brand. What you want to do is to sell yourself in this deck. How do you do that? Well, really this is, again, we're going back to the overall theme of this class. You want to focus on what you do different. So, when I put decks together, I focus on my own personal story. It's a lot of what I do. I mean, I like to show examples of beautiful images that I've taken and examples of relationships that I've had with other clients and projects that I've done. I may let them know that I have a really amazing idea, but I'd want to be very careful with ideas. You don't necessarily want to give an amazing idea to an agency or a brand because, well, to be honest, what would prevent them from just taking that idea and running with it with someone else? It can happen. This is advertising. This isn't child's play. This is like real business stuff here. So, you want to be smart about that. Eventually, you need to get to the point where you're sharing off ideas, but you want to make sure before that happens, you've established this great rapport and great relationship with someone real on the other end that you can develop this good trust with. Should you do stuff for free on Instagram? Okay. So, this is something that's near and dear to my heart. I'll just ask forgiveness if I'm getting too preachy or am I soapbox here. But, some thoughts about doing free work, because Instagram is a place that brands have realized that a lot of people are willing to do things for free. They're willing to travel for free for instance. Here's my personal philosophy on this. I'm not going to hate on anybody that takes a free trip because peoples' circumstances are totally different, right? You may have a day job and a lot of people do, most people do, and they might also have an amazing Instagram. If so, some travel company comes to you and says,"Hey, we noticed your Instagram account. We think it's amazing. We want to fly you to our beautiful country and we're going to do all these fun events. " You say, "Wow, that sounds amazing. What are you going to pay me?" They say, "Sorry, we don't have a budget for that because we're flying you out of here and we're going to put you in these hotels and we're going to do all these things." So, this is a real thing. This exists out there and it's not that hard actually to get involved in those things. However, I can tell you that there is money that you can be made and you have to ask for it. I guess the overall thing that I want you to take away is to recognize, there is a value behind what you do. Whether you consider yourself a professional photographer or not, there is a value there. If a brand approaches you, they already recognized that there's a value. Don't let them get away with offering for you to do work for free. If you truly believe this is a fair trade, then you can do it, right? There's a lot of opportunities out there to do it. However, if you do something for free, I think the real question you need to ask yourself is, well then, why should anybody else pay me for the thing that I'm doing? So, I guess what I'm saying is, if you think it's part of your strategy and if I do X job for free, the next job those people are going to pay me because I already proved that I can do one. But that's actually not the case. If you're going to do one thing for free, you certainly that that brand is never going to pay you for any future job. It's possible that that information can be shared, right? Like, "Oh, hey, I know someone that will do something for free. It's this person." So then, another brand will contact you and they might know that, "Okay. Well, that's the arrangements." Remember, there's always a value for the social work that you do. There's always a value. A brand may say that they don't have a budget but don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself and stick up for your work and say that there is a value. You remember you are the expert in Instagram, and that's why they're coming to you because they recognize that you have invested a lot of energy and effort into your own Instagram account. That actually is an expertise. That is knowledge that you have. Make sure you remember that and have the confidence to say, "Hey, I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm talking about and there's a value there, so pay me". Some other things to remember when working with a brand and working on a project, very important is the rights to your images. You always want to retain complete rights. That's pretty standard in a type of social relationship where you're going to be creating content for Instagram with a brand. That's usually how it works. However you want to make sure you see it in writing. You always want to have a contract. You don't want there to be any ambiguity. Sore make sure you have a contract. Make sure that you are clear about where the brand, where the client is going to be using your images. That's very important, that is just very clear. Like, you're going to be using my images on your Instagram account and you're going to be using these images exactly on my end. So, that all needs to be arranged and ahead of time. For years and years, advertising agencies have been amazing in helping these brands tell these stories through commercials. They do it through print ads. They do through billboards. They've been making the television commercials that we see. These same agencies now are helping the brands move into the world of advertising on Instagram, right? A lot of them are reaching out to Instagram users to find that help. One of your own personal strategies when you want to work with brands, is to create a relationship with these agencies. Agencies have developed the relationships already. They may already be working on lots of concepts that you can get involved in. So, I guess what I'm saying is, think about not just approaching a brand directly but also developing a relationship with one of these agencies, and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. You can just Google a brand and then also what agency are they working with. You can see who they are. You can make a contact there and do agency visits. I've had a lot of success by just going in and introducing myself and telling my story, and creating these relationships with people that already have their relationships with the brands in the context of creating advertisements. If you do have the opportunity to do brand work, there are some FCC guidelines that you need to be aware of. The most important of which is that you need to clearly state that you are working with this brand. So, that has to be very clear. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can say, for instance, I'm working with this brand or I'm partnering with this group. There are also some hashtags that you can use like hashtag sponsored, hashtag ad. There will be varying degrees of what you might be asked to do in that case but just be aware there are FCC regulations that you have to follow because it's an advertisement. If you're developing a relationship with a brand, every brand has some sort of product, but I would just recommend that you avoid doing any sort of product placement. No one wants to see their bottle, or a can, or whatever of something stuck in front of a mountain or anything like that. I mean, I've seen examples of that on Instagram and my initial reaction is like yikes. I'm just looking at a product. I think that there's a better way to do it. When you develop this relationship with the brands, I would encourage you to think of creative ways that you can tell the story of the brand, or the story of the product without actually just shoving the product in your face. To be honest, it doesn't involve any skill or creativity to take a picture of a product. It just doesn't. Alright. So, I've just done a little bit of a brain dump there. So, let's try to bring it all back and then just recap real quickly with working with brands. Remain authentic and true to yourself. Don't be afraid to develop awesome relationships with the brands. But always remain confident that the work you do has value. Make sure you follow the FCC guidelines and last but not least, have fun. 9. Thank You: Thanks for taking this class. Hopefully, it was helpful for you. The most important thing now is your chance to go out and try apply some of these skills in a practical real way and share the results with me and the rest of the class. So, again, your assignment is basically put a new spin on an old image or an old idea. Whether, it's a location that's been shot to death or a concept that's been done to death, go and try and put your own spin on it and upload your images. I don't know, one, two, three, different and do it as many times as you want. Do me a personal favor when you have done this assignment come and tell me on Instagram that you've done the assignment and I'll come check out your work. That's it. Good luck.