September 22nd, 2011
by Amy Dunn
Unless you have been living under a rock, you know how popular photo/video sharing is. It is so popular in fact, there are dozens of sites devoted to just sharing images: Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, PhotoBucket to name a few. Here are some interesting stats regarding image sharing:
- The average American Internet user watches 30 minutes of video online per day [40 percent increase over 2009] (comScore) Compared to 5 hours of television per day
- Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
- YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011)
- More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared on Facebook each month.
- People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute
- YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month (These YouTube stats don’t include videos viewed on phones and embedded in websites)
Twitter has jumped on the image sharing bandwagon with the recent launch of User Galleries which will make the process of searching (and finding) images shared on Twitter a lot easier. You will notice now the four most recent images are displayed on a user profile.
Businesses can really boost their social marketing efforts by incorporating more photos and video into blog posts, Facebook page updates, even Tweets. Why?
Photos and video go beyond words. Ever heard the term “A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words”? People connect to images, and thanks to dozens of mobile apps and countless platforms, they are very easy to share in real time- making them more relevant to your target audience.
Using photos and video in your status updates are an effective way to engage your target audience, improve your search engine results and showcase your organization. Your followers relate to photos and video, and statistics indicate updates containing photos or video have higher click rates:
Photos and videos show up in the Facebook news feed as thumbnail images. Due to their size, they almost require interaction as users click on them to make them large enough to see. Be sure to add a comment that encourages users to open the photo and add comments of their own. – 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure
- Remember that these are not your personal photos or video…it is a representation of your brand and if there is any doubt whether a photo is appropriate enough to be used, it isn’t.
- Learn how to post status updates to your business page using Facebook mobile apps. If you can post updates to your page from your mobile phone, you should easily be able to share photos as well. Don’t have a smart phone? You can still upload photos into your business page the same way you would your personal profile.
- Twitter now allows users to post photos directly in their status updates! If you know how to make Twitter update on your mobile phone, you can also upload photos using the camera icon. You can also upload photos directly on the site.
Learn More by reading 6 Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Page With Photos
