Flickr: One Easy Social Networking Tool That Can Enhance Your Small Business’s Web Presence

At a recent eCommerce presentation, the speaker discussed various social networking tools that larger businesses and online-only businesses are using to increase web presence and boost search engine rankings. One that stood out for me as something that could be a boon to many smaller storefront businesses with a small website that are looking to improve their web presence but don’t have money right now to hire a developer is to start a Flickr Gallery for the business. (Once your gallery is up and running there are ways your developer can integrate it into your site that will give it even more impact, but they aren’t essential. I’ll discuss them in a later blog post.) Let’s say you sell custom jewelry, arrange flowers, or do landscaping. If you have a digital camera, start taking the best photos of your creations that you can. Then set up a gallery on Flickr using your business name. Describe your business in the description field. Include the contact info. If you have a nice photo of yourself or your storefront, upload it now. If you don’t already have a good inexpensive photo editing program like Photoshop Elements, download Picasa. It’s fast and easy to use, but it also gives you a lot of control that can help you turn your good photos into great-looking photos. Also download the Picasa2Flickr plug-in and install it. This will give you a button to upload from Picasa directly to your Flickr gallery. (On the above, I’m assuming you’re using a Windows computer. If you’re using a Mac, upgrade to iPhoto ‘09. It has similar easy editing, and a button built in to share photos with your Flickr gallery) Often, Picasa’s "I Feel Lucky" button will do the heavy lifting on correcting color and contrast, leaving you to do two things before uploading:

• Crop the photo tightly to the subject.
• Use the "Add Text" feature to discreetly add your company name and web URL to the photo. You want it to be clear enough to read when the photo is at a medium size, but not so obtrusive that people try to crop it out if they use your photo or that it will make them decide to use a different photo instead.

When you click the upload to Flickr button, one of the fields you see will ask you for tags. This is easy to skip, but next to the photo itself, this is probably the most important item to take some time with. The tags are how people searching for photos on Flickr will find your pictures. At the end of the list of tag should be your company name and what you do (e.g., custom jewelry, landscaping). But the list of tags should start with a word or two describing the style of the design, what sort of thing the item is (front yard, necklace, etc.), the names of the items used in the design. so, if you’re a jeweler, people searching Flickr for "diamonds" or "gold" or "emerald ring" will see photos of your jewelry. Set your photos with a Creative Commons share-alike noncommercial license. This will let bloggers feel free to use it for illustrations in their stories and other uses. It’s not the photo itself that is your valuable creative product—it’s the item you’ve taken a picture of. People search for photos on Flickr all the time. Some people people get "feeds" of images in various categories to play on their computers in the backgrounds or as part of their screensavers. And every photo becomes a new way for people to find out about you and your company and your website. What’s the potential downside? Someone could print out a photo of one of your designs, take it to someone else, and say "Make me something like this." But people could do that now. Take pictures off your website, take pictures of your work themselves. But for most creative businesses, the potential upside of having new people learn about you liking your designs and coming to you for something custom is worth the potential risk—not to mention the boost for your search engine ranking by having each of those photo pages have a link pointing at your website in the description page. This is another reason for discreetly including your company name and URL in your photos: It should discourage reputable jewelers from stealing your designs outright. And there’s not much you can do about the disreputable ones. Once your gallery is established, you can encourage your customers to post their photos of your work and to comment in your gallery. If you’re taking photos of your work anyway (and you should be), setting up a Flickr account for your business and uploading the photos will take only a few extra minutes, and over time the payoff could be huge. And later, when you get your developer to include a slideshow on your site that pulls images from your Flickr gallery, this becomes content that you can continuously update, without waiting for your web developer to do anything.