Humans are visual creatures. It’s no wonder then that the top trending social media sites – Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook – have built their success on turning our addiction to images into the ultimate hook, on their sites and Apps. We love seeing things even more than we love reading about them. In the world of social media images rule. In the world of search, images can help you to rule the internet.
Images are content. This means that adding one photo to your blog posting or putting an image alongside one of your views is not enough. Real picture content, that is going to shared between your potential clients and customers, means creating fully realized picture pages. The sort of web pages that used to be called galleries – each picture is an opportunity for your readers to click and share your content. If you aren’t the Huffington Post, or even Copyblogger, the chances of people sharing text on its own are low. Images, however, trigger the social signals within any reader, and you may find that links to and from your site grow exponentially when you start introducing an image sharing strategy.
Here is how to get social media sharing going with single image, and multiple image pages:
Single Image Pages
Despite the power of multiple image pages, you can still create a buzz with one well chosen image. There is a good chance that you are already sharing the images that make you smile, or for that matter make you feel any emotion, with potential customers via social media sites and Apps. Well if you take one extra step of putting that shareable content into your blog or business website, and then sharing the link back to your post, you will get double the exposure.
Of course it goes without saying that any content, image or otherwise, that you reproduce on your site must be fully credited to the original artist. If the picture is not yours then give credit to the person who took it. Most times they will benefit from you giving their work more exposure, but be careful to check licensing before you post.
Accompany the image with a complete text description and relevant copy. You may quickly find that your social signals pick up on these optimized image pages, so be sure to make it easy for your visitors to pin, like and share your new content.
Multiple Image Pages
Multiple image pages can take more time and effort to create and curate. If you focus on a single topic, and find several picture that fit the issue you can’t go wrong. These multiple pages can be extremely effective for location based topics. Your local customers will enjoy seeing and sharing pictures from their own area, and the social signals will quickly pick up.
You still might not be the Huffington Post, but once you are counting your retweets in the 100s rather than the 10s you’ll be pleased that you introduced images to your social media strategy.