New SmugMug Homepage, Quick Share on Twitter and Facebook, Marketing tips
SmugMug’s New Homepage
Our brand-spanking new homepage blew the hinges off every door at HQ… and hopefully yours, too. Now you’ll look even more savvy when you tell your friends about us.
(Don’t be afraid to slip a mention of your referral code when you do, so you both can $ave a few bucks.)
Quick Share on Facebook and Twitter
We gave fair warning last time that we were going to give our avid photographers a real chance at fame. Here it is:
Your photos now come fully equipped with a no-brainer way for people to tout your gorgeous photos to friends, followers and family… making them your fans, too.
Find a Tweet and Facebook Like button in your SmugMug and Journal-style galleries. You’ll also see it at the top of the Lightbox view when any photo is viewed by itself. Give your buddies a hint and pass them a link to our new Visitor Help page. If you’ve got questions about how this works, we have help for you, too.
When people hit those buttons, we’ll post a link to the photo to their Twitter or Facebook streams. Sit back and watch your popularity grow.
To opt out, just disable the Quick Share feature in your Control Panel’s Settings tab. Also, the buttons will by default follow your normal privacy settings: visible when the share button is enabled, which you can set with any gallery’s Easy Sharing option in Gallery Settings. They won’t appear in password-protected galleries or on photos that you’ve hidden.
Boost Your Sales
Social marketing is essential for ambitious Pros, especially when web presence is a powerful tool for finding and keeping clients. We put our best marketing tips all in one place, so look here, follow along and start raking it in.
Changes to the SmugMug Footer
We made an important change to the way Power and Pro Smuggers customize their footers. Our full-sized footer slimmed down so visitors (and you) can more easily find the important links at the bottom of your pages. Those of you who’ve chosen the “Mini Footer” option in Easy and Advanced Customization may have noticed that it’s even more compact and sexy. Caliente!
Pros can’t completely remove the footer from their sites, but if you’ve done this already don’t worry about bringing them back.
We made this change to help you and your business: Visitors with questions can come straight to us for help. Our world-famous Support Heroes work ’round-the-clock (and ’round-the-globe) to answer inquiries, so you can stay busy shooting your gigs. We hate keeping people waiting so trust us to always point them in the right direction, ASAP.
Bulk Gallery Settings: Measure Twice, Cut Once.
A few Smuggers have written to us in a panic, having inadvertently applied sweeping changes to all of their galleries using the bulk Gallery Settings tool. Now you’ll see super-noticeable popup message every time you attempt to make a change across your whole site. As an extra safeguard, hitting Enter/Return at that window will cancel out instead of applying your changes.
We know a lot of you work on auto-pilot and it’s our mission to prevent major organizational disasters in your neck of the woods.
Enjoy the new features. We sure love bringing them to you!
The SmugMug Family
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Wow that looks really nice and I don’t even use SmugMug.
The only thing which lets the whole page down is the SmugMug logo, it looks childish… Time for an upgrade?
The SMUGMUG font was just updated too! The smiley face is still there, but that’s cool, it compliments the bold text!
Hey, great work guys. Particularly like the security enhancement for protecting site-wide changes. Adding social-networking links makes a lot of sense too.
Thanks folks! This will be a big help for me.
I’ve already blogged this so that I can get the word out to all of my customers!
I like the like button, but I wish it would show the photo that is liked on the page, not just a link. Maybe in the future???
My vote is to have the default option where it is just a hyperlink and an alternate option where it would show the photo. As it is, on my Facebook albums, I know these images are more likely to be copied by potential clients. I put a few out there of a given shoot to show some cool images. I want to entice them to visit the full galleries and not just have my shots for free to post or copy. I don’t want them to see all my smugmug shots via Facebook. I want them to visit my smugmug galleries and hopefully like what they see enough to start shopping!
I find these Tweet and FB buttons rather obnoxious.
Cool, the Quick Share feature is pretty easy to disable in the Gallery settings.
Hello, When I hit the FB like button I don’t see it getting posted on my FB page. For the Twitter share I think you should elaborate on the text of Me Likey ….maybe “Me Likey this awesome photo.” I know I can change the text on the Twitter post myself.
Thanks,
Leighton
I have turned to buttons off for now. The like button did post to my FB page but my web address that is in the post on my FB wall links to SmugMug’s main welcome page.
Hi Leighton, we’re gonna fix that 2nd link. Sorry about that!
Are we talking about pics here? Clicking on the “I like” button will only visualize a link on Facebook. We want a thumbnail/preview of the picture otherwise no-one will notice on Facebook, pleeeease.
Agree with Sergio.
yes it needs to paste the FB wall others wise it will get lost on the “this person like this” one line thing
(I’m with SmugMug.) Our understanding is that something needs to be liked a number of times before the thumbnail starts showing up. We believe we are passing it in correctly, but we’re investigating.
Hey Chris, I was just looking into that, too. I wonder if the og:image property needs to be set in order for FB to pick up the image on the Like?
Also, I thought there was the ability to comment on the Like when you click it, but I don’t see that here. FB’s documentation says, “If users do add a comment, the story published back to Facebook is given more prominence.”, so maybe that would help as well?
I love the continuous changes you guys make. And I love the logo as it is too…makes it memorable to me. Keep up great work.
So the link won’t show up until the picture has been “liked” several times? I just tested it out & I didn’t get a link on my FB page… tho it would be better to have a thumbnail of the picture actually post.
Thanks for the upgrades. They’re all great!
I’ve “liked” several of my photos, just as a test & none of them have shown up on my feed. Any idea why?
For people wanting to track Likes coming from you site, go here: http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and set up your domain. You’ll need to add a meta tag to the “Head tag” part of the customizer.
Nice. Visited site and placed the value and it works!
Awesome new feature that should help spread our work, but I do see the same issue that others were mentioning. It would better spread our work and encourage clicks with a thumbnail. Also, when I tested the ‘like’ button it posted the name and most of my description…which was way too much info. This is a new feature, which I’m sure will have bugs such as this that SM will iron out in the future! The tweet saying ‘me likey’ is a bit fruity and unprofessional too lol. The text can be changed of course, but my concern is with people using mobile or something not being able to and cancelling the tweet or thinking that that’s the words we chose to represent our work.
Also, is there any likelihood anytime soon of being able to add custom products that we can fulfill? I currently do metal tins, dog tags and other products through 3 total labs and it would be lovely to be able to have customers order through one place rather than for me to send them to SM for prints and meet in person for special products. That’s my biggest missing piece of the SM puzzle. Thanks you guys keep rockin!
Nice work. Easy socializing right in front. Keep it up.
I LOVE that SmugMug is trying to become Facebook friendly. However:
I’d like to chime in and say that I also think it is CRUCIAL to include a thumbnail of the image we’re “Liking”. I mean, it’s PHOTOGRAPHY we’re talking about here, therefore, it stands to reason that a picture of the photo would do loads more good than a line of text telling us about the photo.
Also, why does it post a link back to smugmug’s homepage? Seems to me that it should link back to OUR sites.
HI Kory – first part is up to facebook – the more likes, and fb puts a thumb (so we understand). The second is a bug and we’ll be fixing it, thanks!
Love the bulk gallery settings. Incredibly helpful.
I don’t care what you do with FB as long as I don’t have to have any reference to it on my site.
Keep up the improvements guys.
I still wish the gaping security hole would be addressed.
love this feature and I am impressed with all the new features that you guys keep bringing out.
My wishlist for when you tweak:
- Twitter and Fb buttons would show up on every SmugMug view, not just ‘journal’ and the smugmug regular view;
- Twitter and FB buttons would be there even if they gallery is password protected – my thinking is that my customers have the password, and it’s their choice if they want to show images on FB and Twitter.
kisses and love,
Sarah
I use a black theme and I find the buttons most disturbing, they attract too much attention. Fortunately the Twitter/FB buttons can be turned off while maintaining the share button, well done!
I am really excited about these new buttons. For those of us who want to get as much web exposure as possible, this is major news.
I set up everything on my Smug account to enable the buttons and they are now appearing with each photo, but, not being a big FB or twitter person, I am not sureI understand what exactly the buttons are supposed to do.
I created a FB account and when I press the FB button it registered a ‘LIKE” but I could find no trace of this on my FB account. I got my wife to use her FB account and registered another like on the same pic, but still nothing on my or her FB account shows up. Should it be showing up in News Feed on FB? What is supposed to show up, a link?
Thanks in advance for any help with understanding how this works or how I can make this work for me.
Once again, this is just a super idea !!!!
Dan and Patti
Hi Dan and Patti – look on your wall
Hurrah…it worked !!!!!!
Thanks
HELP! I scanned the
I noticed on Facebook that a friend had already “Liked” several of my photos and it had 2 issues…
The first linked to the photo fine (though identified by the gallery’s name) but the rest, “…and 3 other pages” were not linkable. The box pops up saying “friends who like this” with no one and no link to the photos she was trying to share????
The second problem was the link sending people to SmugMug.com, but I did see that is already on the list to fix.
Thanks! I LOVE the button additions and constant improvements!
Juli
Oops… I cut off my sentence…
I scanned the comments and found one of my answers already, but I am still left with this…
When you use a keyword on the bottom of a photo to find other images the Twitter & FB buttons show on the bottom of the photos for the results even though they have been disabled in the settings.
Thanks, that’ll be nice to have… Now ANDY, can we get a blogging design layout added to our Gallery Style options?? So we can post a few engagment shots blogging about the upcoming wedding or post a Grad session video clip & photos to get the kids excited for the Grad season coming up? That would be Smuggerific!!! What pro wouldn’t just LoVe that feature?!
Excellent new Website… as owner of a web design & development business, I always find it interesting to see other people’s sites. Wow this is really nice…
Sooo, you guys went back to requiring pros to maintain the SmugMug footer? Any reason why?
Hi when choosing pics to print, is there a “wish list” or somewhere to deposit/save the images in smugmug so one can come and go adding pics to wish list. As it stands at the mo one has choose all the pics in one go with out the ability to save pics to print at a later date. Regards
ps I think the logo is great, don’t change it!
Have not been using the share feature because it sends out my personal smugmug email to people. I would like to have it sent my business email that my customers use.
I like the idea of FB and Twitter links but I want to limit them to certain galleries. Is that possible?
I tested mine and it just links to smugmug and not my image. No thumbnail as well. waste of time
i love smugmug……
mai koi good girl se dosti krna chta hu……
please help me….
my mobile number is 7654412773
This works well, but I would like to see it bring people to my smugmug homepage and not just a gallery.
why is the footer thrust on pro users?
I know this is kinda off the subject. But what do people think about smugmug. I am looking for a site to store my pictures in and can’t decide which to use. I like being able to download photo files, not pic by pic. But the problem is, if i am going to pay for a site, i would like to be able to download files as well. ALso is there a site out there to download hd video. Achvd format. Thanks
God I’m sick of Twitter and Facebook everywhere. Fortunately, you gave me a way to opt out or I wouldn’t be renewing this year.
“Pros can’t completely remove the footer from their sites, but if you’ve done this already don’t worry about bringing them back.”
What a nightmare, I am now stuck with an photo hosting service where the service has deteriorated and I am forced to promote it!
H
How do you get the theme that is depicted in the screenshot on the main page (the one with the balloons)? I really think that looks awesome, but I’m not finding it as an option. Any assistance appreciated.
Nathan
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