Have you ever really wanted to get the word out on Facebook but the results of your efforts were significantly less than what you had hoped?
Chances are you did not use a picture to spread the word.
Video is certainly continuing to rise (see my post on 6 Reasons Why You Should Think Through Your Ministry Presence) but photos are visually captivating BUT much easier to consume since they only require a quick scan rather than 2-5 minutes of dedicated focus.
These stats are from the Facebook blog:
1.7 billion user photos
2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos
160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available
60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space
3+ billion photo images served to users every day
100,000+ images served per second during our peak traffic windows
Using photos to capture attention is the MOST effective content medium on Facebook.
Here’s some suggestions to get started:
- If you have an iPhone download Instagram right now! It makes photo sharing to Facebook dead simple.
- Instead of quoting someone or something that you found online, take a screenshot.
- Share a photo and then comment on it with the context of the photo. It will not only put the image first in the feed, but a comment will boost the photo’s relevance in your friend’s newsfeed.
Are you using photos strategically and intentionally? What sort of success have you seen?
Great tip! I’ve not been doing this, but will give it a try.
thanks nate! at a large student conference i just attended we took a screenshot of one of the speaker’s website, went in and added text for when he was speaking, uploaded it to the fan page, and tagged a bunch of people. saw some good engagement as a result.
Who did you tag? Random people that may be interested (is this spam? does it upset people?) or people associated with the speaker?
we only tagged people who were interested in the speaker/content. many students cannot attend due to finances or distance. we were intentional about tagging only people who had previously expressed interest.
good warning though not to use photos as another form of spam.
I wasn’t making a charge against you – just asking so I can learn.
Thanks Brian.
for sure. didn’t take it as a charge. it’s good to get clarity on virality/spam. sometimes they look very similar!
This is a good post, thanks. I’m going to look over my facebook posts to see if I am doing this.
for sure mike! i’ve tried to shoot for 80% of my facebook posts as pictures–i was 20% pictures, 80% text before.