And So We Become One

As mentioned a few times, over the past several months we’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on our brand.

We started the journey wanting to give our website an update.  You’d think that would have been easy enough.  Just work out how we want it to look, choose the photos we felt showcased our work and hit upload.

Nope!

Once we started down that path it very quickly snowballed into an overhaul of the entire business as we noticed a lot of things we could be doing differently to improve it.

And so began months of research, test prints, discussions and planning.

The website still hasn’t been touched at this stage because we’ve had so many other things to sort first.  One of our biggest changes from a client perspective has been transforming our packages from digital only offerings, to offering an end to end service with high quality prints and print products on offer.

Another very important task has been making sure we’re communicating with our clients and audiences in the most effective ways.  Up to this point we’ve had two separate branches of the company – Layton Findlater Photography for artistic prints such as landscapes and urban photos, and Findlater Photography for portraits and weddings.

Through feedback from clients, family and friends we’ve found that separating the two has been causing confusion for our brand.  The choice was made to merge the two branches under the Findlater Photography banner; which meant deciding what to do with our two Facebook pages.

It was very welcome news when we discovered we could merge two similar pages on Facebook and keep the current audiences from both pages.  We figured we’d keep the Layton Findlater Photography page as this was the oldest and had more followers.  Then once they were merged we were going to apply to have the address and name of the page changed to Findlater Photography.

We hit a slight snag though.  Although you can merge pages, you can’t pick and choose what’s kept and what’s deleted.  You also can’t change the page address once it’s been set up or change the page name to something that already existed (such as changing it to Findlater Photography once that page was removed).

Plan A…down the gurgler!

It was a hard decision, but since we wanted to stick with the Findlater Photography name and logo it only left us one option.  Merge Layton Findlater Photography into Findlater Photography rather than the other way round.

This meant we’d get what we needed; but it also meant loosing all posts and photos from Layton Findlater Photography.  That was hard enough, but to add an extra dimension to the decision it also meant loosing some pictures that only existed on Facebook (after suffering a huge harddrive crash last year which wiped out over 12 months of photos).

Cue me spending the next two weeks painstakingly going through and saving a copy of every single image that was uploaded to Layton Findlater Photography since the page was launched in April 2012.  Well over 1000 images.

I didn’t really need to save them all, but the alternative was to sit with Layton trying to locate each image on his harddrive to figure out which ones were lost.  It was much easier just to save them all.

Thoughout this process I was also noting down which images were the highest rated, based on the most ‘likes’ and the most shares.

We’d like to take this opportunity to share the top 25 images from the Layton Findlater Photography Facebook page.  These are the original Facebook uploads so some have our regular watermark, but over half either don’t have our logo or in a couple of cases have the name typed as a watermark in the centre.

We hope you enjoyed our wee farewell to Layton Findlater Photography as we start launching the changes to Findlater Photography over the next couple of months.

What’s your favourite image from our farewell collection?  How do you manage your brand and marketing?  Any tips, advice or horror stories?  Leave us a comment below and let us know.