Flickr is one of the most popular photo-sharing websites online. (Facebook, if you’re curious, is the most popular photo-sharing website. But given the photos there are hidden away behind profiles and fan pages, Flickr is the most useful to small business.)
I just love Flickr – it’s so useful for small business not just as a marketing tool but as a great way to improve website content. Especially in this industry – travel is a very photogenic product, so the sharing of great travel photography can really help as a promotional tool. Let’s take a closer look.
How it Works
Why I love Flickr so much is because it’s just dead easy. Even a techie amateur can find his/her way around with ease. Here’s the main toolbar you’ll see after you login – which only requires you to register a Yahoo account and give just a few details. Let’s walk through each menu item:
- You contains your personal profile information. Add links to your website, a photo of yourself, and other descriptive details.
- Organize allows you to add or update your photos. We’ll cover photo sets below, but you’d go here to update your photo sets as well as descriptions of existing photos or add new photos.
- Contacts is where you manage you connections with other Flickr users. You can mark contacts as Friends or Family, and allow only users in those groups to see particular photos.
- Groups is where you can find other groups of similar photos and you can even setup your own Flickr group. We’ll cover what groups are below.
- Explore really isn’t a business tool but a tool if you want to sit and just soak up some inspiration. Flickr calls it interestingness and I suppose that’s a good word for it. Random photos on random topics.
That’s it really – isn’t much more than that. For small business, go and explore photos to find images you might use in your on pages and content; you can also upload your own photos and share them to help highlight the features of your offering and help tell your story.
Groups vs Sets
The only somewhat tricky concept in Flickr is Groups versus Sets.
Sets are how you can organise your own photos. Think of them like photo albums. When someone goes to your profile, they can find their way around your photos via the sets you’ve created.
Groups are a place where multiple people can come together to share photos. This is a key tool to give your photos more visibility. Groups can also have discussions, which can be quite interesting but is of course something else to moderate if it’s your own group! Group administrators have a lot of control over their group, allowing only certain features or functions to be enabled and allowing for approval of members or photos if they so choose.
The Key: Creative Commons License
The reason Flickr works so well is not just because the site is dead-easy to use, its because it makes easy use of the Creative Commons License. You can read more about this license on the Creative Commons official website but in essence it’s a common agreement that photographers agree with those who use their photos. You can upload a photo to Flickr and say it is copyrighted without the ability to re-use, but what’s the fun in that?
Most photographers upload their photos and give them a creative commons license. There’s many types, but the most common on Flickr is the re-use with attribution license. I use one here on this page – see above the Flickr image with the buttons? Now look at the bottom of the article – go ahead, I’ll wait. There’s a link to the author’s Flickr page, which indicates that this photo is by that author, it’s not mind. I make it clear that it’s not my photo, but as you can see you don’t need to have it plastered across the page.
Note: This system is based on trust. Take note of photographer’s license, and stick to it. Don’t steal copyrighted photos. You wouldn’t want people to do that to you, right?
If you want to search for a photo to use for a blog article or webpage and you want photos that have been licensed for re-use, you need to click on “Advanced Search” on the search page and ensure the checkboxes are ticked as shown:
Creative Commons exists for music and video clips as well, and it works the same way as photos do.
Photo by poolie
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