How to Market Online via Flickr and Photobucket
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., A.P.R.
Searching For Profit, Charleston, MA
Feb 27, 2007, 18:46
Have you caught the digital camera bug? Approximately 29.5 million digital cameras were sold in 2006, a new record, and this does not include the cameras that are part of most new cell phones. Consumers each day take untold millions of pictures with these digital devices. Are you leveraging the current fascination with photos in your online marketing program? Have you considered how shared photos might enhance your online presence?
This article will look at several tactics for using online photo-sharing sites such as Photobucket (www.photobucket.com) and Flickr (www.flickr.com) to help promote your business. Photobucket has more than 35 million users who upload more than 7 million personal photos, graphics, and videos to Photobucket every day. Flickr serves hundreds of millions of photos each day, upwards of a billion on their busiest days. Now that's a lot of pictures!
First, let's consider what you can do with these sites. Both Photobucket and Flickr let users post their images for online sharing; however, the capabilities of these two services are slightly different.
Photobucket
With Photobucket you can share your photos by e-mail or post them to an online album directly at MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Blogger, and Friendster. Not only can users share photos and video, but they can edit and remix them right online. Photobucket recently added this capability through an agreement with Adobe. This technology, currently in beta on the site, lets users combine images, videos, text, and music into albums. The entire "mashup" can be shared on blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace. "Mashups" and how they can be part of the marketing mix will be the topic of another article.
Flickr
Flickr, too, is an online photo-sharing community, but Flickr does not yet offer editing capabilities. Flickr, however, makes it very easy to add geo-targeting to photos so that users and viewers can identify where the photos were taken. Flickr users also can readily group and share photos in photo pools and create badges; whereby they can display their photos on their blogs and web sites.
The old adage about a picture being worth 1,000 words is really true in marketing. These photo-sharing sites make it very easy for you to bring images directly to your website or blog. Now you can immediately display pictures of company events, grand openings and similar ceremonies, teams, musical groups, choirs, facilities for which you are raising money, even photos of key personnel. With Photobucket you can create your own visual display of products offered for sale and share it with others. Because these photo sites are searchable, you can ensure that others who share your interests can find your photos, giving them broader reach than was previously possible.
Tags and Descriptions
The key to effective distribution rests in accurately tagging your photos and in being sure to take advantage of all of the editing capabilities that the photo-sharing sites are adding. For example, based on a search query in Flickr for "global warming," I viewed this image http://www.flickr.com/photos/revkin/233388397/ that is part of the "global climate change pool" and found the following text in the description:
"You can learn more in my new book on the once and future Arctic, which is written for the whole family and follows my 3 recent Arctic reporting trips, including one to the North Pole.
The first chapter of the book, The North Pole Was Here can be read online: www.nytimes.com/learning/globalwarming."
If you have a marketing message that will have more impact visually than in words alone, try using a photo-sharing site as part of your next online marketing campaign.
Amanda Watlington is a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies, AdTech, and other conferences. She is the principal of Searching for Profit, Charleston, Massachusetts.
