Social Media and Stock Photo Sales

Social networks have long been an effective tool for promoting websites and driving significant traffic. It’s no secret that many websites receive the majority of their visitors from social media rather than from search engines. Social platforms are steadily evolving into strong engines for driving product and service sales.

By the way, social media can also deliver great results for selling photos through stock agencies. How exactly? Here’s a simple example of using a social network to boost the visibility of your image on a stock site.

A short but true story about how conversations in social networks can dramatically increase attention to your work. It’s really simple: with just a few clicks, your stock illustration or photo can climb to the top for buyers.

An ordinary image of a garden hose on Dreamstime suddenly went viral after the director, actor, and author Albert Brooks posted the following tweet with a link to the image:

There it is, baby. Take it off DM immediately. I don’t want anyone else to see it!

Here’s the image itself, if you’re curious:

Maybe the tweet was a joke, but it was retweeted by hundreds (Albert now has over 100,000 followers), and thousands more people saw it.

Many of Albert’s followers’ followers also saw the post and retweeted it again. As a result, most of those readers clicked through to view the image on the Dreamstime stock site.

Even Steve Martin dropped by!

The tweet itself was spontaneous—no one was actively monitoring outcomes—and the image isn’t the type that every social media visitor would buy, but now all those people have heard about Dreamstime. Some may have purchased an image, explored the author’s portfolio, or bookmarked the portfolio link.

This whole ripple effect shows how powerful Twitter and similar platforms can be as marketing tools, and how unexpected things can happen while casually engaging on social media—whether for work or fun.

Here are the view stats for that hose image after it was shared on Twitter:

And that’s just one real case of how effective social media can be for promotion. Next time, it could be your image. But instead of waiting for luck, start actively promoting your work through social networks.

By the way, some popular microstocks already let you connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to automatically share updates about your uploads and sales. So go ahead and set up exports, start retweeting, sharing, and following your images!

Yes, you can retweet today’s post if you have a Twitter account. Just click the retweet button on the right at the very top of this article.

Source: http://blog.dreamstime.com/2011/06/09/-11-000-views-for-an-image-in-a-single-day_art35385

Original article author: Serban Enache