A strong online presence helps a business show its voice to a huge audience. With many tools at hand to use, reels, TikTok, beautiful imagery, collaborations, now more than ever is the time to invest in your SoMe marketing strategy.

I’m a full-time professional photographer and social media manager with a decade of real-world experience within content creation. I’ve worked with accommodation businesses in the Highlands and across the UK, as well as in Europe and have photographed commercially for businesses such as GORE-TEX, Loomi Activewear, Chateau Peyronin Bordeaux, Woodlands Glencoe, Black Diamond, Rab Equipment, Arc’teryx and many more. The best place to see the work I do in real-time is via my LinkedIn profile.

I live in North Ballachulish and have been exploring the Scottish mountains as an elite athlete for many years. I’ve visited every corner of Scotland and i’m as passionate as anyone about promoting our wonderful country. I have a deep understanding of tourism and especially with creating content to support it. I believe I am an ambassador for Scotland and take a huge amount of pride in this. The last year travelling to many different parts of the world the thing that I think I enjoyed most is when people asked me “are you Scottish?”. I’ve offered private walking tours of Scotland for many years, so have real genuine knowledge and skill at communicating with people looking for advice on what’s best to do here. I’ve added a selection of my favourite reviews from guiding people around Scotland in the bottom section of this page.

I want to thank you for taking the time to look through my portfolio of work and tell you how excited I am at the prospect of working with you. If you need to know, or would like to see more, please just ask brian.sharp@outlook.com

I first really dived into social media management in 2020 when I moved to the Highlands, though i’d been successfully managing my own media for many years prior. I am still a supported athlete with Rab, one of the UK’s biggest outdoor clothing brands. They support me as a mountain runner and I race in some of the UK’s most challenging ultra-marathons. You can read my athlete profile here and examples of content i’ve created for Rab can be found below. With Woodlands Glencoe, I managed their social media whilst working as an activity manager there, then in October 2022 I got my big opportunity, to travel and work with a global mountain running circuit. Here I had my chance to really show what I can do as a social media manager and content creator, in the last year of managing their socials I’ve shown new ways to connect with their audience, bringing unseen engagement to their accounts. For example, when I first took over, Instagram had 95k followers and it currently has 128k. Of all the reels posted on their instagram account, the top 10 most engaged with are ones that I created in the past 6 months. I’ve successfully managed to achieve over 1.5 million engaged accounts at any given time.

Being an effective social media manager should involve: engaging on the platform, actively using the platform, liking posts, commenting - this is a key way to reach people and to show the algorithms you are an active user. Responding to messages timely, collaborating with relevant accounts, using topics, using alt text. This is how we support to content we create.

When creating content, I start with an idea and find a place for it within the content plan. I source the content, either by obtaining it from somewhere else, or creating it on my own, professionally editing video content in Premiere Pro and exporting and sizing the content in the exact format for social media. I then pair the content with trending audio on the platform it’s going on - this is especially important, then either schedule the content, or post in real-time depending on certain parameters. For example, if there’s going to be a collaborator on the post, Instagram won’t allow you schedule. Then I watch it grow, engage with comments, share it and tag relevant pages that will help my reel gain more reach. There’s many factors that contribute to a successful post, many of which can’t be created on the platform, or on any editing application. Is the content relevant? Has something happened locally to the hotel that we should post about. Is there an upcoming event we really want people to know about, but we know the engagement on these types of posts can be low, how can we get more eyes on our account in the lead up to posting the content that we really want people to see. This is an insight into how I work as a social media manager with strong marketing skills and content creation skills. Here’s some examples of success over the last year.

Types of long-form content that when filmed can be broken down into short-form for social media is one of the best ways to produce content that can be used, and reused for many years to come. The below VisitScotland example for their “Scotland is Calling” campaign is a prime example. As a recognised Scottish institution, keeping up to date with what the main tourism boards are producing is a smart way to share similar content, staying relevant within the overall output of tourism in the country. This can be mixed with your own content to create a link between the credibility of an organisation like VisitScotland and your business. I had the pleasure of being part of this campaign, being asked to location scout and ‘reluctantly’ model for some shots. Skip to the minute mark to see me and my partner having a wee dram with a pretty spectacular view.