Ah yes, social media: the thing that your business knows it should be doing but knows precious little about.
The bad news is that you’re still going to have to learn how the whole thing works if you’re going to make an impact. But the good news is that getting your content out there has never been easier. And it’s all thanks to the good old-fashioned photograph. Pictures are fast becoming the currency of social media itself.
Here are some of the many and varied ways photography can boost your social media strategy significantly.
Attract, Engage And Build A Community, Not Traffic
When somebody is confronted with a wall of text, they have to exert an enormous amount of effort to read it and understand what it is saying. This is a problem. It means that your message is always hidden behind an invisible wall of effort. But pictures aren’t like that. People are wired up to easily interpret the content of photos, and that’s why photos are the ultimate marketing tool.
Social media sites, like Instagram, beat out the rest of the competition when it comes to photos. And there’s reason to believe that Instagram will become the social media platform of choice in the near future. According to the data, users spend more time on Instagram pages than they do on any more social media platform. Yes – even more than YouTube.
This suggests that Instagram is engaging users in ways that other platforms, like Reddit and Facebook are not. An Instagram brand campaign for many companies is a no-brainer. To start the ball rolling on your next campaign, get auto Instagram likes and build a community of dedicated followers.
Re-Work Your Content
Most businesses are pressed for time. There just isn’t enough of it in the day to create content, along with everything else that they have to do. You’d be working from the moment you got up to the moment you went to sleep.
The cool thing about visual social media, like Instagram, is that it allows you to work smarter, rather than harder. All those marketing images you had taken for separate advertising through different channels? You can use them to form the basis of your content on Instagram. Show off what your company can do visually, and engage your customers with the high-quality photography you’ve used elsewhere.
Utilize Community Photos
Photographs are, in many ways, the ultimate user-generated content. But they can be used by companies to increase the reach of their marketing.
Let’s say that there is an Instagram user who regularly creates new content that is relevant to your business. One tactic is to approach that person and ask them if they’d allow you to use their photos in marketing. Using customer photos is one of the most effective ways that companies can generate wider social media interest in their products. They reach out to influencers using their products. And then those influencers share the content among their fan base.
Everlast did just this with their gym products, using photos of amateurs wearing their equipment.