A Picture's Worth a Thousand Clients

Since humans are naturally visual creatures and primarily use sight to absorb data, it should come as no surprise that pictures are excellent marketing tools. Rather than writing long winded blog posts about how great a product is, simply posting an eye appealing picture can often go a lot further when it comes to influencing a consumer to make a purchase. With this in mind, let's go over some ways you can use social networking tools to increase visibility and connect with your target audience.



Facebook
This social media site is currently the most widely used in the world and is close to having 1 billion users. As a result, it's the perfect place to create a business page and post pictures of your products. All you have to do is upload a nice looking picture and place it into your timeline. To grab the attention of users, it's also smart to include a brief description or even ask a relevant question to encourage commenting. This way you can get people to interact and potentially share your picture with others.

Pinterest
Although this image centered social media site doesn't have the same user base as Facebook and Twitter, it is steadily growing in popularity. In fact, Pinterest actually exceeded Facebook and Twitter in terms of its number of users after its first two years. The best part about Pinterest is that it has great aesthetics and every board consists solely of pictures that quickly grab the attention of users. Consequently, it's possible to create a board around nearly any niche. Due to the ease in which users can "like," "repin" or comment on your pins, you can get your products in front of countless people in a relatively short amount of time. This means that even you have a limited number of followers, you can still get significant exposure when others with many followers "repin" your products.

Tumblr
One of the lesser used, but nonetheless effective social networking tools is Tumblr. This site revolves around microblogging where users place pictures, videos and brief text onto their Tumblr. While the majority of individuals use Tumblr as a personal blog and not for marketing, it's still incredibly valuable for posting pictures and marketing your products. This site also makes it extremely easy to put pictures on your blog and is perfect if your aim is to use multiple social media sites for branding.

Twitter
While twitter is primarily text based and revolves around 140 character or less posts, you can easily attach pictures to your posts. This resource is especially powerful if you already have a business page set up that includes recent updates and general industry information. The only drawback is that people have to click on a link to see a picture where as the previous resources automatically display the picture. Nevertheless, the vast quantity of people who use Twitter everyday make it a powerful marketing tool.

Tagging
To make sure that your pictures receive maximum visibility, you should always be sure to properly tag them. This involves using relevant keywords so people can find them on social networking sites as well as search engines. In most cases, 5 to 10 tags is sufficient and can also help your pictures wind up on Google's image results.

This article was written by Sheldon Armstrong on behalf of 522 Productions, a video production company in Washington D.C., Virginia, Baltimore, and Maryland that helps you tell your story to the world.