Smart Ways to Use Stock Photos for Social Media

On social media one picture is worth a thousand clicks — or even more, when done right. But there’s no doubt it can be challenging for a brand or a business to harvest enough high quality and engaging photos to make social media sites exciting, compelling, and professional-looking. The amount of visual material being churned out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook is numerically tremendous — but hardly ever remarkable or engaging. That’s got to change, if a business intends to grow and broaden its customer base.

In today’s marketing game, the real players say that a stock photo equals a cliche — and like a cliche it’s ignored and passed over by consumers. And sometimes it even leaves behind a negative impression, when potential customers become irritated that the magical social media they are looking at can’t always give them something visually thrilling and spectacular.

Finding the right IG and Pinterest analytic tool will be crucial to the success of any social media professional site. And it’s not just for more advanced marketing professionals. Such apps are usually very user friendly even for the beginning photo seeker.

Of course there are some really good DIY apps on Instagram that provide basic tutorials to help a brand display amazing and gripping graphics. While this kind of outside help should never be discounted or ignored, it can sometimes feel like outsiders are running the graphics department without having a real feel for what the brand has come to stand for, or needs to stand for. Plus, it can all run into money — more money than a marketing/advertising department can come up with.

So here’s a few hacks that the experts recommend for companies that want to make their graphics totally unique, stay brand consistent, and relevant to the customer base.

Think outside the frame

Stock photos cost money. Always have, always will. Plus, companies get into legal trouble from time to time when they don’t properly acknowledge the provenance of a photograph, meme, or other visual aid. One solution is to look at stock images on a public domain visual site for all graphics — but the choices are rather limited, and the photos are pretty vague and/or cliched. There’s really nothing there for the marketer who wants their social media sites to stand out and catch the eye. A better idea, and one that costs much less, is to initiate some in-house photography competition. Digital photography is cheap and easy to do, so ask employees to submit their own photo ideas for the next marketing campaign. With a little photoshopping an in-house photograph can turn into a gripping brand-expanding icon — and all for the price of a t-shirt.

Key words

Once stock photo sites are decided on for a marketing campaign, or just to juice up a social media site, it’s time to take stock of keywords in SEO searches. For example, a photo of a pink flamingo is wanted — entering just ‘pink flamingo’ is going to produce thousands of lackluster results. A better idea is to enter something like ‘crazy pink flamingo’ or ‘famous pink flamingo’ and then pick through the more specific images for the one just right for the upcoming campaign.