INSTAGRAM Sucks but VERO is Worse | The TRUTH about VERO True Social, a Photographer's Perspective

don't waste your time on vero don't i don't know why everybody's telling you to go check out vero but i'm going to give you a very different opinion an opinion from the perspective of a working professional photographer who makes his living as a working professional photographer hit subscribe if that sounds like you so a short while ago pretty much every creator on youtube was complaining about instagram and now a ton of those people have created videos telling you about how amazing vero true social is and why you should join it and follow them but those people are content creators who want you to follow them so that they can feed you more content that they create that's their job their income is directly tied to how many people consume their content and buy their lightroom presets and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that nothing it is a legitimate way to earn a living coincidentally as you can see i myself am also a content creator but my primary source of income really my only source of income is my photography so i want to take a few minutes to tell you why as a professional photographer or aspiring professional you should not waste your time on vero first of all and most importantly your clients are not on vero they're not if you're spending time doing social media marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy posting your work that few people are going to see the damn world better be the right people our directors and our producers are not on vero photo editors are not on vero looking for new artists corporate clients family clients actors needing head shots fitness clients and future brides they're not on vero i follow a very particular set of accounts on instagram a very particular set it's a curated list of accounts that i want to interact with regularly so that they continue to know that i exist and that i am available to hire so i checked out vera i started going through the list of accounts that i follow on instagram such as ad agencies magazines photographers media companies design companies to see if i could find them on vero and i stopped pretty quickly when i realized they're just not there after about 10 minutes i had only found three accounts from my instagram feed that were on vero rankin british gq and clay enos who is a new york-based kia photographer who also happens to be an ambassador for vero contrary to what people are saying vero is not a photo sharing app yeah it has photo and video sharing capabilities but it is very clear that vero is not a photography centric platform vero seems to care more about the music you're listening to the movies you're watching the books you're reading the games you're playing and the websites and apps that you're using than it does about photos and videos that you're creating here's what the post page looks like yes images and video are right at the top but look at all this other stuff when you click over to the discovery page you find pills for music movies tv series games apps books and places nothing for photos nothing for photography now you might be thinking but look there's a big button right there that says photography on vero but that just goes to a blog post from february called the world of photography on vero i know it's a blog post because you can find the same article on their website in order to actually discover photography on vero you have to scroll down the discover page to the photography pill and that will only show you posts that contain the hashtag photographyhashtag one of the things that people complain about with instagram is actually one of its best features and that's being able to discover work from other people in a feed yeah instagram up by hijacking your home feed and filling it with ads and posts from people you don't follow even though you do have three levels of feeds on instagram your primary your followers and your favorites it's not exactly intuitive to most people and you can't set a default as your primary feed instead of copying tick tock's video format what they failed to realize is that what makes tick tock wildly successful is not the fact that it's video but it's for you page the fyp is all about showing you content that you are very likely to resonate with based on content that you've liked before instagram is trying to do that with the primary feed a little bit but they already have that feature on the discovery page they just need to tweak the algorithm and make it better what instagram should have done is reduced its ad load on all the feeds moved all the posts from people were not following into the discovery page and made the discovery page full width images instead of thumbnails that you have to click on in order to get a full width feed you should then move that discovery page to the home page and change the discover page to a friends and following page that would make it a killer app again so you would have the best of both worlds instead a whole subset of users are flailing about and abandoning a once great platform in search of something better but that greener grass is turning out to be flavorless and malnourishing if i open vero and then i close the app again and open it again the next day or two days later i shouldn't see the same stuff if i see the same first post i'm closing the app if there are new posts i will only scroll until i start to see the stuff that i've already seen and then i'm closing the app this is why despite everyone complaining about it chronological feeds are actually worse off for all of us they're not good for engagement they kill user retention they don't show us work from people that we like but maybe haven't seen that particular work they prioritize recency over quality and there's zero discoverability of other artists creatives and people of all walks of life that we might otherwise want to engage with they also keep us in our own little bubbles which is horrible for experiencing work from people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives we just see the same thing over and over and over this is why i think tick tock is amazing it's why a lot of people left instagram for tick tock and just another reason why vero is not an app you should invest your time in if vera wants to be wildly successful or even of minimal benefit to its users it needs to drop this no algorithm nonsense and make its users work insanely discoverable even a chronological feed of the posts from just the people that you follow is still an algorithm it's just a very simple one it's not a recommendation engine but it is an algorithm most creators are also complaining about the lack of engagement on instagram and vero only seems to do slightly better let's look at world-renowned photographer rankin one of his recent photos posted two weeks ago only has 84 likes 30 000 followers 84 likes another image this one of forest whitaker also posted two weeks ago only has 135 likes 30 000 followers 135 likes how long will it take you to get to 30 000 followers and more importantly will that effort translate into money in your bank or will it just be a waste of time one of the biggest issues that bothers me is that vero does not have an api because it doesn't have an api or a developer platform i cannot connect to zapier honestly vero this should be a top priority for you if you want to grow your platform i don't actually post to instagram i built an airtable database and connected it to zapier and i use that to schedule and post my images to all of my social media platforms at the same time i don't have time to be posting images to every single platform i need to be able to automate that process of posting my work at set times on a schedule because there's no api this also means vero isn't connected to any of the social media management services like later.com planoly and hootsuite the way instagram pinterest facebook linkedin behance and many more are i'm a one-man shop i need to use automation to reduce my workload and stay ahead or just even keep up to my competitors if it's not on zapier that means a ton of added time posting to yet another social media platform that does not bring in new clients time is money and vero will eat up a lot of your time because of its lack of integration with any other social media management apps or automation integrators such as zapier vero claims to be true social but it doesn't really offer anything different than instagram i actually think it's worse a lot worse but vero's been around for seven years and in its current form it's horrible for both organic discovery and getting your work seen by people who are in a position to hire you now i was easily able to connect my contacts and easily to find a few friends and colleagues like my friend renee and my colleagues chris knock and dave brosha but as far as my business goes they're not gonna hire me as a professional photographer with a business to run especially if you're running it by yourself don't waste your time the benefit is just not there you're much better off investing your time and energy promoting yourself on social media platforms where your potential clients are already looking for commercial photographers that's going to be instagram behance and maybe commune until vero gets the discovery aspect figured out i honestly don't see how you or i are going to gain followers organically unless you're peter mckinnon and already have a following larger than the entire population of finland then good luck getting your work seen by anyone outside of your existing social networks which reminds me for more videos related to photography and running a photography business hit subscribe and turn on the notifications you can find me on instagram tick tock and sure vero at kevin patrick robbins but i suspect you won't actually be using vero in two months so just follow me on instagram and maybe tiktok the links are in the description that's it take care