The Power of Pictures Online

[tweet_quote]Pictures have the power to evoke emotion, memories, and awaken the senses.[/tweet_quote] Unlike words, it takes little effort to decipher what a picture is saying. The meaning of a picture may be just as open to interpretation as a piece of literature. Using pictures on social media and your website or blog should be a powerful tool your company is using as part of your internet marketing efforts.

Website pictures
On both your blog and website, pictures should be used to illustrate the main point of your page or post. This helps in the processing of the information and can also enhance your writing. Pictures on your site can also effect search engine optimization. By attaching alternate text or ALT text, this allows search engines to see you are providing services to those who cannot see your image, and as a result adding one more positive point to your SEO.

In addition, pictures should also be considered on your page or post to enhance the social sharing of your pages or posts.

Social Media
Sharing images can serve as great conversation starters. They can allow you to more easily initiate your relationships online. Postings on Facebook with images and links to blog posts or web pages are more likely to get clicked on than simple links or a short description.

Pinterest has seen a major boom in growth over the last 18 months and is becoming one of the top image sharing services online. Pinterest, with its unique image sharing board, quickly surpassed its competition due to the creative nature of the images shared and with the easy way users can discover new images. At this time, 15% of all internet users are sharing pictures on Pinterest.

Mobile Apps
A discussion of using pictures online would not be complete without discussing mobile applications. There are many applications out there to take pictures with, but none have seen the popularity or sheer volume of sharing as Instagram. In two years and an acquisition by Facebook later, Instagram is the powerhouse in mobile photo sharing. More than 50 million users share 300 million pictures a day to Facebook alone. Instagram allows you to take pictures, add a filter to the image, add a message, and blast it out across Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. This allows you to engage audiences in those channels as well.

What are your favorite ways to use pictures? How do you share them? Leave us a comment below or join the discussion on our Facebook page.