How to get hired for a video shoot in 43 minutes on facebook. 

“Facebook is a waste of time. I don’t need to know what you had for lunch today” is a common response that I hear when I speak with people about why I am involved in social media – hmmm, what did I have for lunch today … but back to the point of this post: I wanted to share with you how I got booked to shoot a video shoot from my Facebook post in less than an hour.

I have been getting into shooting video over the last few months – you can check out some of my films on vimeo – and I have been seeing that there is a lot to learn from a photographer’s perspective. I purchased my first HD-DSLR 3 months ago and got hooked on my first paid video production last week, so I posted a blurb about editing this shoot on my Facebook page.

I tagged my wife (the beautiful model in the photo) and left it at that. I also did not design the post to be anything special my comment on facebook merely read: “Spend most of the day editing a commercial movie project, while learning Adobe Premiere, incidentally the client was very happy with the rough cut :)“

That was late Thursday night (around 10:30 pm), I was ready to call it a night, take the dog for a walk and go to sleep. On that walk I get a comment on my facebook post – 24 minutes after uploading the screen shot – from one of my photography clients. I answered the post and that exchange ended with: “Hey….I got a movie project we should talk about ; )” at 11:23 pm, 43 minutes after my original facebook post. I called the next morning and we are looking at producing a series of half a dozen short movie clips for this client in May.

“So an existing client contacts you to shoot for him” you say, “big deal.” – but wait this is where the facebook story really starts getting interesting. A few months ago, my wife (remember the lovely lady from my video shoot :) sees a post on facebook from one of her friends, Katja, who had posted a few images of a recent job photographed for some yacht building company on location in the Bahamas – beautiful photographs by the way – anyway my wife sends a facebook friends request to the brand manager of this company, who accepts based on their mutual friend, the model Katja, with me so far? Good. Turns out that the brand manager is friends with one of my good friend Hugo, whom I have known since college, he is also one of my wife’s facebook friends – she knows him through me and Hugo showed up a mutual friend when my wife’s friend request got accepted by the brand manager. So I friend the brand manager as well and based on our mutual friend he accepts my friends request.

The beauty of facebook in this instance, is that a couple of total strangers in real life, get connected based on relationships that we all had with friends of each other:

Yes you are right, facebook does not replace old fashioned relationships. It is not a magical machine that provides work out of the blue, but in this instance it showed me a relationship that I had through an old college buddy, who is best friends with a brand manager, who hired a model that is friends with my wife.

And that’s how you get hired on facebook in 43 minutes.