Social Media and Sales on Stock Agencies

Social Media has long been recognized as an effective tool for promoting websites and generating significant traffic. It’s no secret that many websites on the Internet receive a large portion of their visitors from social media rather than from search engines. Social media is becoming a powerful tool for generating sales of various products and services.

By the way, social media can also have a big impact on selling photos through stock agencies. How? Here’s an example of using social media to boost the popularity of your image on a stock agency.

A short but true story about how social media engagement can become an effective way to increase attention to your work. It’s all quite simple: just a few clicks, and your stock illustration or photo is already trending for buyers.

So, a simple garden hose image from the Dreamstime stock agency became wildly popular after director, actor, and author Albert Brooks tweeted the following message with a link to the image:

Here it is, baby. Delete it from DM right now. I don’t want anyone else to see it!

Here’s the image itself, in case you’re curious:

Perhaps this message sounded like a joke, but hundreds of people retweeted it (Albert now has over 100,000 followers on Twitter) and thousands of other visitors read it.

Additionally, many of Albert’s followers’ followers also saw this humorous message and even retweeted it again. As a result, most visitors who read this joke went to check out the Dreamstime stock agency site.

Even Steve Martin dropped by!

The tweet itself happened spontaneously, without anyone actively monitoring it. The image wasn’t exactly the kind most visitors from social media would buy, but now many people know about Dreamstime. Some may have even purchased images or browsed the portfolio of this image’s author, or perhaps bookmarked a link to his portfolio.

All this activity shows how powerful a marketing tool Twitter and other similar social platforms can be, and how unexpectedly interesting things can happen while you’re simply chatting on social media, whether for work or for fun.

By the way, here are the view stats for this garden hose image after the Twitter link was shared:

This is just one real story of how effective social media can be for promotion. Next time, it could be your image, but don’t wait for a miracle — start promoting your work on social media yourself.

By the way, did you know that some popular microstocks already allow you to connect your social media accounts, like Twitter and Facebook, to export information about your uploads and sales on the stock agency? So, go ahead and set up the export, retweet, share, and follow your images!

Yes, you can retweet my article today if you have a Twitter account. Just click the retweet button at the top right at the start of this article.

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

Original article by: Serban Enache