A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words

So many discussions of social media use start and end with text. And the written word is great, don’t get us wrong. But images. photographs, drawings, maybe even a video…are more than just ways to break up big blocks of texts. Images are a great way to quickly connect an emotion to the other information you’re providing.

It’s odd to imagine that only five or six years ago, it took a great level of technical expertise to add images to a web page. Today with most social media, including Facebook and Twitter, it is possible to quickly and easily include pictures, videos, and other types of content other than simple text. This will enrich your content and give your customers even more to talk about.

In the most general terms, your images will be of people, places and things. All three categories can have a place in your social media usage.

The ‘people’ category is a rich category, as you can consider posting pictures of your self, your staff, and your customers.  At Sweet Flour bakery in Toronto, owners Rich and Kim Gans take a photograph of the  “Customer of the Day” that they feature on their website and in their social media. Recently, the customers included a two-year old boy named Lucas enjoying a cookie filled with candy.

It’s very likely, then, that Lucas’ family will email that link out to their friends and family.  Another blog post featured a customer named Nick, who was referred to as one of the bakery’s “top Twitter fans”. This alerts customers that Sweet Flour has a twitter presence, but does so in a somewhat unobtrusive way. Both of these blogs posts have potential customers to the site, and eventually, to the store.

It is important that you have your customers’ permission to use their pictures, and it never hurts to get them to sign a simple photograph release: a single piece of paper that says “I give permission to <store name> to use my image in their online communications. I also allow them to use images of the minors listed below.” Then have a space for them to sign and to list the names of any children under the age of 18.

Photographs of places: your store, the environment around your store, and even the city where your store is, can be very evocative. Somer Deck is the marketing manager at the Fifth Street Public Market, a small shopping center featuring locally owned, non-chain stores. Somer identified key benefits of using images in her social media messages:

“Anytime I try and do any sort of campaign, it’s always more important for me to implement pictures than it is necessarily text, because customers identify with that.  They identify with our logo, with the fountain (that is at the center of the market). That’s just such an important part of who we are, is showing that it is a lifestyle; it’s not just a place where you come and buy jeans or kitchenware.  You can do all of those things, for sure, but you can also bring your kids down here and play with the ducks in the fountain.”

The Fifth Street Public Market also does a great job of taking pictures of the changing seasons, which also serves to remind customers that as the seasons change, they need new merchandise for the new season

In my next post, we’ll talk about the final category, ‘things’, as well as consider the pros and cons of consumer generated media.

– Kim