Marketing your photography

So I’ve read all the articles, watched hours of videos, listened to hours of podcasts and the thing I hear over and over and over when it comes to marketing photography is SOCIAL MEDIA SOCIAL MEDIA SOCIAL MEDIA!!! Which I get it, they say about 50% of the US population uses social media and there’s about 500 million Instagram users but here’s the thing; how the hell do you find your ideal client?Everyyyone says “use local hashtags!” And “write long interesting stories with a bunch of questions as captions” I’ve tried the long stories but I haven’t noticed any more engagement than usual, in fact I’ve been told by a few people that they DONT want to sit there having to read a long caption. I don’t know about y’all but I live in an area where there’s about 20 photographers in my town alone not to mention I live about an hour away from an army base which every other army wife is a photographer and the way Instagram has it set up, all the local hashtags have a “top” page and only the people getting THOUSANDS of likes get on the top page so it’s like what’s the point of using the local hashtags?!On top of that I’d say about 90% of my followers are all other photographers which I hear is bad because A) not the ideal client B) probably not gonna be a client at allI kept reading people say to “join the local pages on Facebook for photographers” so I did but half of the time it’s just them doing insta “follow trains” and I’ve tried joining in a couple times and that’s how I ended up with 90% photographers following me. I’m just trying to figure out how any of this advice is supposed to work? If the ideal client is supposed to find me through local hashtags but they only show the very top elite people (or should I say people with the most followers) and the only followers I am getting are other photographers then what the hell?I know a lot of people on reddit are anti social media so I’m not sure how well this post will do here and I know word of mouth is the best but I don’t know how to get my work out there effectively! I did a few free model calls (which I know is a very controversial topic) I did 4 shoots for free to start building my portfolio and about 2 of them helped me get business. I got 3 weddings booked from it which is the field that I want to go into but they’re all in the late fall so I don’t know what to do until then! What do y’all do in “off seasons”. Should I try discounted model calls? Running paid social media ads? Twiddling my thumbs hoping work comes in? via /r/photography https://ift.tt/2uuCg0c