Show of hands — How many of you actively use Flickr for business or personal use? Not only does Yahoo’s photo sharing website have a large following in the United States, India and United Kingdom, Flickr has continued to improve since its humble launch in 2004, and has a lot to offer anyone with great images to showcase. Because Flickr’s emphasis is on top-notch photography and short videos, the site isn’t for everyone, but between its large global community of dedicated sharers, free premier image hosting services and bonus method for people to discover your latest creative efforts, Flickr is absolutely worth a look:
1. Fill Out Your Entire Flickr Profile
First thing’s first: Just like you would for any other social media platform, you must fully complete your Flickr profile. At the very least, plug in your website, a “Hometown”, and write a little introduction to give your newfound fans an extra reason to follow you. Not only will your Flickr friends be more likely to visit your other social media pages and official website, it’s another way for search engines to send new photo enthusiasts your way.
2. Flickr is for Photographrs, Not Advertisrs
While it’s great to proudly display your information, remember that Flickr is first and foremost concerned with sharing awesome images with photography aficionados. Take Nokia for example: The Finnish smartphone maker could’ve simply posted a bunch of pre-existing promotional images of their devices on their Flickr profile and called it a day. Instead, they uploaded sharp pictures from their Windows Phones as seen at tech events that show off the colorful devices in a warm and upbeat environment. If you have something relevant to your brand that you can share on Flickr, whether it’s a perfectly-placed product photo, or an eye-catching snapshot from your office window, make sure it is a high quality image, visually entertaining, and most importantly, that it’s associated with your online presence.
3. Reasons To Become A Flickr Uploadr
Why should you consider Flickr when you can just as easily upload pictures to Facebook or Pinterest? Outside of the sizable number of users already at home on Flickr that will enjoy the fresh content you’ll send their way, Flickr provides all users one terabyte of data so you can easily upload a massive amount of images and small videos. Anyone with a colossal backlog of pictures to share will appreciate the extra space, and in addition, Flickr allows users to upload photos (up to 200MB) and 1080p HD videos (up to 1GB) for free. Like Facebook’s Albums and Pinterest’s Pinboards, Flickr makes it easy to place groups of images into Collections for easy access for you and your followers. It’s hard to find fault in a popular and well-designed photo sharing site that will host 500,000 HD pictures for free!
4. Become A Great Communicatr With The Flickr Community
You’ll need to maintain your Flickr profile by updating it with new content on a regular basis and commenting whenever someone in the Flickr community leaves a note about one of your uploads. Responding to positive comments on your uploads, adding particularly friendly fans as contacts and going out of your way to share positive thoughts on some of your favorite creations will demonstrate that you genuinely care about Flickr’s users and their feedback. After all, being a positive, contributing member of the Flickr community will draw views your way like a moth to a flame!
5. Learn To Be A Flickr Mastr
If you’re going to extend your platform to Flickr, take the time to research the photo sharing application, become familiar with its straightforward interface, and consider downloading the official Flickr app to manage your profile on the go. There is plenty to see and do on Flickr, such as contributing to The Commons, a mammoth collection of public photographs, exploring the Camera Finder, a treasure trove of graphs detailing the most popular devices used to snap shots on Flickr, and playing around with the World Map, a live atlas that frequently updates with the latest images uploaded worldwide. If anything, taking the time to familiarize yourself with Flickr will give you some inspiration, the basics of what you can accomplish on the platform, and you might just have some fun while you’re at it.
The visual world of Flickr is ruled by savvy photographers and their Collections of gorgeous product photography, beautiful vistas of exotic lands, adorable animals and other brilliant imagery, as well as those who regularly update their profiles, interact with the community and, most importantly, enjoy being a part of a group that places rich camerawork on a high pedestal. If you have an archive of quality pictures and some free time, Flickr may become a valuable branch of your social media tree.
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