What is it?
Flickr is a photo management software owned by Yahoo! with two main uses – it’s a place to share photos (/videos) and also to organise and store them for safe keeping. Used correctly, however, it can be a valuable tool to boost your online search ranking.
Although the PRO version costs $24.95 a year, the free version is more than suitable for most businesses. Your uploads will be limited to 300MB of photos and 2 videos (max 90secs) per month. You’re also limited to 200 images in your Photostream (don’t worry, explanantion of that coming up) and also slightly lower-resolution images than the PRO version.
When you upload photos, you can organise them into sets and they’re also “published” to your Photostream (a but like Facebook’s timeline or Twitter’s newsfeed).
Good bits?
A picture says a thousand words – this is an easy way to post pictures you take showing off your local area and property at it’s best. You can search other people’s pictures and share them too. It integrates with the other major social networks and is a great place to host pictures without having to use space on your own website (although you can embed images and galleries from Flickr in your site).
If you add Flickr to your marketing effort, you will benefit from increased search engine indexing – both Google and Bing consider Flickr as a major component in the social aspects of searches, resulting in a better SEO for you.
Bad bits?
As with any sharing site, you are adding pictures up into the public domain so make sure you check out privacy settings and also copyright sections of the Flickr FAQ. It’s probably best to keep a business profile and personal completely separate.
How to make it work
Make sure you tag photos and provide full descriptions, including your company name and web address. Also, make sure you let people use your pictures. Bloggers love free images they can use to liven up their writing, so any use of your images is a good thing.
Points to take away:
It’s a great, free way to increase your exposure online.
Tag and describe images effectively to increase your SEO.
