How to promote your business on Flickr

Bringing the expansive online photo archive into focus

Flickr offers one of the largest image archives and communities online. Unfortunately, it’s often not targeted, because most small businesses aren’t good at creating the one thing they need to have credibility on Flickr: high-quality, non-marketing images.

This is a big deal, because Flickr is not just a community of photos, it is a community in which high-quality photography is appreciated. Sure, people use Flickr to share their point-and-shoot photos with family, but the power users of Flickr and the communities that you would care about as a marketer are usually looking at very high-quality images.

Make sure your photographs are good enough before using the techniques I suggest. Here are a few tips for how you might use Flickr for marketing.

1. Share quality photos. This doesn’t mean hiring a professional photographer. Those images are great for your Web site, but Flickr works best when you share more authentic “real-life” photos. To take great ones, you may want to upgrade your point-and-shoot to a real digital SLR camera with a high-quality lens. Often, using a better camera is the only change you’ll need for improving your photos dramatically.