The photography community is particularly active on Twitter, and as algorithms were changing on other social platforms in 2022 and prioritizing video content, we saw an opportunity to reach the photography professionals and hobbyists active on Twitter. Photographers expressed frustration as they had difficulty maintaining visibility of their work on other platforms and Twitter had become the preferred social platform for photographers to congregate. We saw an opportunity for growth for Lightroom and developed a new strategy to empower, reach and engage the photography community.
Adobe Lightroom is a photo editing application that enables professional photographers and photo enthusiasts alike to create, edit, store and share photos; it’s an essential tool for today’s photographers. It has become an authentic part of conversations happening on social media amongst photographers. We noticed a very apparent pain point, amongst photographers, which was having a place and platform for their work to be seen, recognized, and appreciated. We wanted to focus our efforts on creating a space that further empowered the community and lowered the barrier to entry when it came to sharing photography.
Instead of centering the brand, we wanted to center the photographers and spotlight them and their work. This was executed through daily photography retweets, reformatting influencer workshares for engagement and retweet-ability and weekly call to action tweets with photography-based prompts urging users to share their work around a specific theme or moment (e.g. “share your coziest captures” or “drop your 2022 photography eras:”).
These CTA tweets quickly garnered the attention of the photography community and encouraged them to share similar tweets and threads with their audiences in addition to participating and looking forward to ours. This new strategy not only caught the attention of photographers with all different kinds of skill levels, but it also attracted everyday social users who wouldn’t consider themselves photographers but now had a place to share photos and the captured moments that they felt proud about.
Our new engagement-driven strategy has allowed us to spotlight up-and-coming photographers and their work to the robust photography audience that exists on Twitter. In addition to us proactively engaging with our followers, we also witnessed the photography community bloom organically on our channel. Not only did we see our audience connecting and engaging with us, but they were also connecting and engaging with each other, with just as much, if not more passion. The channel was able to tap into the photography community and extend it to create a larger space for everyone that has a passion for the art from all over the world with different cultures, stories and skill sets.
In addition to the above, we had also picked up on conversations within the community and incorporated it into our daily tweets and community management (e.g. “GM photographers” which is a phrase used by the community when logging on for the day and is often accompanied by a photograph) and we make sure to directly engage with our audience in real time as they share these photos.
Not only has strategy helped to create another space for the photography audience to gather on Twitter, but it has further established Lightroom’s role as an expert and industry leader in the photo space and has continued to allow us to stand apart from our competitors.
After shifting our strategy at the end of 2022, the refresh has been met with positive sentiment and our engagements, impressions and followers are up month-over-month on the channel without any paid support.
The engagement is consistently 100%+ over benchmark.
Many of our tweets have gotten viral impressions (e.g. ranging from 804K to 11.4 million impressions).
Our audience’s voracious appetite and need for this type of space, where they could share their art, was brought to light as we witnessed engagement with the Lightroom Twitter channel increase overnight and are seeing it continue to grow.
