A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (Photo Sharing)

Chapter 9

Safko, The Social Media Bible

In Chapter 9 of his book Safko advocates using photo sharing web sites. His hypothetical scenario – positioning photos of a business’s product higher on search engines, so people who are in the awareness, search or research stages of the sales funnel will find your product and identify it with you – seems like it would have a good RIO. And naming the photos, tagging them and taking other steps to improve their search engine visibility – are smart moves.

But I’d also like to hear more reasons for using a photo-sharing site than increasing product visibility (and thus sales). What if your organization is not involved in sales?

Safko also does not specifically address the advantages of posting photos on a sharing site as compared to making those photos available on the organization’s own web site. I could think of several possible advantages:

• The uploading process might be easier than on your own web site, because sharing sites are designed to be user-friendly.
• Related to the first point, some photo-sharing sites optimize your photo for the web – in other words, reduce the file size. This would save doing it yourself.
• Perhaps photo-sharing sites give you an advantage in search-engine visibility because searchbots automatically check them.
• Perhaps it is easier to link photos or photo galleries to social network web sites from photo sharing sites.
• And it very plausible that forming or joining groups on photo-sharing sites will make it more likely that somebody finds your photo.

I wish Safko had addressed some of these points. I’m struggling to see many of the possible advantages for photo sharing, unless your organization is involved in sales.