Many photographers know and love Flickr as one of the first social media sites dedicated to photo sharing and the largest online photographer-focused community. Flickr’s seniority status in the photography community is evidence of its potential for longevity, something many online “firsts” fail to achieve in an increasingly fast-paced, digital society. It’s more than just a gallery site, it’s a community.
With the social media landscape often spinning into uncharted territory with issues around privacy and intellectual property rights, Flickr has robust privacy settings and allows users to categorize and organize their content, control licensing levels, and share within groups and onto other social platforms, as well as embed content directly into websites.
FLICKR FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS
Flickr also has the potential to enhance your SEO efforts. When images are uploaded with proper tags and descriptions, search engines can find and understand the content of the images. By having your images show up in a search engine results page, you can begin driving higher levels of awareness to your photography work. Similarly, Flickr’s self-contained search engine allows its users to find images that appeal to them quickly and easily, based on the descriptions and tags assigned to photos.
What does this mean for you, the photographer and photography lover? For starters, Flickr has the potential to be a hub of online activity for your photography business. With SmugMug’s recent acquisition of Flickr, the trajectory of the social media site is set to be more aligned with the needs and wants of the creative community. Making yourself truly part of that community builds legitimacy for your brand and enables you to form closer ties with photographers worldwide who can educate and support you on your journey.
A Bit of History
Any photographer around in the early days of Flickr knows that the company has had its struggles through the years. Flickr was the first online home for many photographers. It was founded in 2004 by Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and entrepreneur Caterina Fake, and in 2005 Yahoo acquired the company. Today under the leadership of SmugMug, which acquired Flickr in 2018, the platform has a new direction and creative-community focus. Flickr is now poised to reclaim its place as a serious social media contender in the photography world and gain a prominent place in digital marketing tool kits.
Using Flickr as a Business Tool
Many users are drawn to Flickr by its core functions of photo sharing and photo storage. While these functions certainly pass the test, what keeps Flickreenos coming back is a set of strong, community-building features that set it apart from the crowded field of social media players designed to appeal to a wider audience.
Who Is on Flickr?
The platform was originally a hub for creatives to connect, and according to Don MacAskill, co-founder and CEO of SmugMug, its future is imagined as “the safe place for photographers to do anything they want to do with their work.”
In other words, Flickr is not just for show and tell. This is a networking tool geared directly toward photographers, and anyone with a modicum of professional savvy will tell you that networking is the lifeblood of any business effort. Even in today’s crowded world of fast-paced sharing and seven-figure follower counts, sometimes it’s still all about who you know.
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FLICKR - THE BENEFITS OF FLICKR
The Benefits of Flickr
So how might Flickr be relevant to your marketing? The beauty of Flickr is its rich community, backed by a depth of features that allow creative business owners to use the platform in several ways. There is no single right way to use Flickr, but there are a number of ways it can be utilized in your marketing tool bag.
1. Flickr for Community
One of the first reasons many photographers fell in love with Flickr was the community that it fostered. That community has grown and evolved over the years, and it now has new and different things to offer both hobbyists, pro-level photographers, and everything in between.
There are many different ways to engage with the community on Flickr. The first is in the home feed, where you can like, comment on, or share the images that are posted by users you follow or within groups you belong to. You can also invite others to add their images to a group via the home feed or add their photos to a gallery that you have curated. The home feed lets you toggle between people you follow and groups that you are in, so that you can engage more intentionally with each.
Flickr groups can function somewhat like collaborative Pinterest boards, where users with similar interests can contribute to a pool of images. There are also discussion boards within each group that allow members to discuss issues relevant to the group theme and ask questions. Finding relevant, active groups can be a wellspring of inspiration and ideas.
You can see any groups you’ve joined by going to the top navigation bar under You – Groups. Here, the groups that you moderate or are a member of will be displayed. You can sort the groups you participate in by their latest activity to see which ones are most worth your time and effort.
By examining when the latest discussion post was made, we can see whether a group has active engagement or is simply a repository for images.
Ready to start looking for Flickr groups to engage in? Check out the complete list of groups here. If you don’t find a group that’s right for your photography needs, you can create one that will be relevant to your ideal client base and invite Flickr users and your contacts to join and engage. And it’s only getting easier to find the right fit, as Flickr continues to roll out improvements to its already streamlined platform. Improved search results are in the works, which will prioritize active groups over inactive ones. This will help photographers engage with sub-communities that they can make meaningful contributions to and gain helpful feedback from in return.
Community Marketing
While “community” might sound like a warm fuzzy word for hanging out with other photographers online, there is also a community marketing aspect to Flickr that can not be overlooked. Community marketing means we are using online venues for conversations with customers and potential prospects and understanding what their needs are. If you have been able to identify ideal client avatars on Flickr, then following them or finding out the groups that they participate in can give you vital information about their needs. Armed with this information, you can refine both your photography and the right marketing message to promote it.
We know that even in a supportive community setting, you need a clear strategy to get your images in front of viewers. As with any other social media platform, there are some specific things you can do to increase engagement of your give your work on Flickr:
• Be authentic – Keep your uploads fresh and interesting to your target audience.
• Be real – Flickr = community = people. Be personable, responsible, and trust-worthy in your interactions on the platform, and flesh out your profile to add a more human element.
• Don’t be that guy – Flickr is not the place for spammy, impersonal comments that ignore the original post (if a good place for those even actually exists).
• Group up – Make contact with other members who share a common interest with you through groups. Submit to themed threads and engage in constructive discussion about other members’ work. Start your own.
• Stay in the loop – Keep an eye on the Flickr Blog to stay notified of new content, upcoming changes, and general points of interest.
• Be informative – Don’t just post your images and walk away! Use tags, titles, and descriptions to talk about what’s going on in your photography and how you made the magic happen.
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FLICKR - FLICKR AS A PORTFOLIO
Flickr is an excellent portfolio tool. The ability to upload, edit, batch, and categorize images gives photographers robust control over their presence on the platform and helps curate the experience of those visiting their profiles. Used in conjunction with a top-notch website (we’ll talk soon about how and why to bridge those two connections), you’ll find it pretty simple to build an engaged following here.
The precise control over the categorization of images is one of the things that puts Flickr in a class of its own. Users have a photo stream where images are shown in chronological order. Flickr gives users several important layers of privacy within their photo stream. Images can be classified as Public, Friends, Family, Friends & Family, or Private. This means that users can still maintain a professional portfolio presentation to the public, while sharing family photos in relative privacy or capitalizing on the storage features Flickr offers.
Since Flickr is primarily about community after all, it’s smart to take advantage of other features the platform offers that add a human touch to your profile. For example, you may want to add a short bio or link to other social media presences. Professional photographers can maintain continuity with other sites they utilize by setting up a customized web address that matches up with their brand. There’s also an option in the
“About” section to select up to 25 of your images to feature. This will give others an idea of your overall interests and style at a glance, not just the most recent work you’ve posted.
Once photos are added to your photo stream they can be grouped into albums. So whether your work is event based, client specific, or focuses on separate bodies of fine art, albums can be used to showcase your collective works in an intuitive way.
Flickr also recently rolled out a new system to easily access images by other photographers that you find inspirational or want to revisit. An unobtrusive plus symbol at the bottom right of an image opens a specialized menu, with options to not only manage where that image appears in your Flickr experience, but to invite the photographer to include that photo in one of your groups. For your own images, you can easily submit to groups by using this same little button.
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FLICKR - FLICKR AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL TOOL
Once you’ve uploaded your photos to Flickr, there are a number of powerful organizational tools within the platform to help you keep your portfolio structured. The batch organizer is the hub of all of your systems within Flickr, letting you edit the titles, tags, and descriptions on photos, as well as allowing you to change the permissions and licensing in a batch. If you find you have images missing from albums, you can organize them into either new or existing ones. You can also use the batch organize tool to add images to groups en mass and edit their geo privacy.
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FLICKR - FLICKR FOR SEO
Much like Pinterest, search engines index images from Flickr. Conversely, when it comes to Instagram, only your profile is indexed and search engines are not allowed to index your images. While this indexing does not drive traffic directly to your website, traffic to your images on Flickr helps search engines see the content as relevant. Including links to your website within your Flickr descriptions and profile can increase traffic to your site if users decide to click through.
One of our favorite Flickr SEO stories dates back to 2010, when
Maroon Five discovered one of Rosie Hardy’s photographs in their search engine results. From there, they contacted Hardy and hired her to shoot their Hands All Over album cover, launching her commercial photography career.
The moral of the story is this: since Flickr images are indexed, they can be found by parties interested in licensing work or hiring you for commissions. And that is a really good thing.
Here are several ways that you can use Flickr in your SEO efforts:
• Optimize your photos – Upload high-quality images and utilize your title, description, and tags to help search engines understand the content of the image. Use keyword-rich descriptions without being spammy.
• Use your images in your blog posts – By creating relevant content for your audience and embedding optimized images from Flickr, you can help search engines understand your content. Make sure you’re including relevant alt tags when you embed your images. Alt tags are pulled from image titles when you use the embed feature on Flickr, so edit these if you need a more keyword-rich description.
• Allow a Creative Commons license – While professional photographers everywhere may have just issued a collective shudder, allowing some of your photos to be licensed under Creative Commons can encourage bloggers and other publications to use one of your images on their site with a link back to your Flickr page. This, in turn, can help with indirect traffic to your website. Note: Don’t do this at the expense of getting licensing revenue from a stock library. But, if you have images that aren’t a good fit for these libraries, consider using the Creative Commons license.
• Get engaged with relevant, active Flickr groups – By being social and helpful in groups, you have the potential to help drive brand awareness and traffic to your web- site.
• Integrate Flickr into everything – Use Flickr to connect with your other platforms. Link your website’s footer to Flickr and mention it on your Facebook about page. This way, potential customers can decide where they want to interact with you. Just remember to use each platform in your toolbox to tell your story in the language of the platform. You can connect Flickr to other social media platforms in your account settings.
• Use Flickr stats to analyze your traffic sources – Just as Google Analytics helps you understand where your website traffic is coming from and what your most popular content is, Flickr stats help you understand these things about your photos. Within Flickr stats, you can also see what search terms are driving traffic to your images, as well as which tags and groups have referred traffic to your photos. Flickr’s analytics are only available to Pro users, however, so that might be worth the upgrade.
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FLICKR - TELLING YOUR STORY ON FLICKR
Flickr can be used as more than just a portfolio to showcase your best work – you can also use it as a tool to show potential customers and vendor partners the story behind your brand.
Here are some things you might want to share on Flickr:
• Your images – Obviously.
• Products – Share images of the products that you offer, such as albums or folio boxes, to give potential customers an idea of what they can purchase as a part of their session. Offer a creative, behind-the-scenes look at your process. Keep in mind that if you’re going to link back to your products, you must be a Flickr Pro user, and show your products in a sharing capacity only; Flickr is not intended for use as a storefront. (Again, this is where bridging your Flickr presence with your website will come in handy.)
• Behind the scenes photos or videos –These can be of you working, whether it’s photographing clients, building sets, or designing.
• Vendor partners – Photograph your vendor partners’ services or spaces. Think beautiful images of your favorite venues to photograph weddings in, or makeup artists that you work with. (Make sure you get their approval before uploading!)
• Your studio – If you have a studio, give potential customers a virtual tour, using images and videos of the space.
Flickr is built to function as a hub for creative business owners to share to their other social media accounts, allowing you to beautifully embed your images in other social posts. Once you upload an image to Flickr, you have the option to share the image to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or Pinterest.
On the mobile app, you can share directly from Flickr to Instagram.
For example, if you choose to share an image from Flickr to Facebook, you can post it on your Facebook Timeline, a Facebook Group, or a page you manage.
If you choose to share your content from Flickr on other social media platforms, spend some time in your respective analytics to see how the algorithms treat your Flickr photos. For example, if you get the same engagement from an image posted natively on Facebook as an image shared via Flickr, then you may want to use Flickr for all of your photo sharing on Facebook.
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