Photo Publishing at its Best

Photo Publishing has become a simple task, namely from mobile devices and by using free applications. Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress and many others fight to grab your work to attract conversation to their sites.

The problem is: all these free websites are not capable to provide you with real visibility outside the restricted cave-system which constitute social networks.

Photo Publishing on Social Networks

Sure, it’s handy to post to social networks. But let’s admit, most images we see on Facebook, Instagram and others are of mediocre quality, carry no message and constitute just a contribution to the global cyber-waste. Yet, we may click on them, like them and comment just to create conversation which will contribute to our social capital as recorded by Klout for example .

This is namely true for social network marketers, who often seem to prostitute themselves just to produce recordable clicks. But do they really look at the pics? Do they really know what they LIKE and do they really care about the content?

Hey guys, grow up: one day we will look at WHAT you have endorsed and liked on the internet and THAT will flow into your Social Profile; that day is not far away, considering that the goal of Social Networks is to produce as precise as possible profiles of each participant to allow advertisers to target their junk with laser-like precision. Your profile will become transparent, visible and without thinking about it, you have written your CV consisting of the long sequence of your online footprints.

Your photos will become readable by the bots and so will the photos you have endorsed :-).

Visibility of Published Photos

The visibility of your pictures on Facebook and Twitter is pretty restricted, considering that you publish to a scrolling timeline and that your stuff is visible just for a short period of time. To keep up with visibility, you need to republish another picture and an other and …. you have never finished with this process, knowing that what you have published an hour ago is worse than cold coffee.

On top you have to bother your family and friends with your throw-away stuff to harvest the hypocritical clicks and comments some nOObs will gracefully give you.

Specialized sites and networks do a better job, such as Flickr. As a professional or also non professional photographer you can build your collections and sets and send people to see your chef d’oeuvres time and again.

And yet, you just continue to build a business and website belonging to someone else  :-). Remember, we all have built YouTube and we all were sold to Google one day? Now we all build Facebook and when they go public, do you get a reward for your work? Have you got any reward for building Skype which has been sold twice since we started building it?

Photo Publishing at its Best

The objective of a marketer remains to sell his products or services and for that he uses his own website, shop and domain or brand. Even affiliate marketers tend to build their authority as affiliate marketers under their own brand. Considering the time some people spend on Facebook for example, can you imagine, how well they could promote their own business investing the same amount of time?

Best practice is to publish your photos FIRST on your own domain and then distribute them to the cave-system, considering these social outlets as places where you want to put your tentacles, like an octopus, to grab what there is to be grabbed. Focus on really interested and interesting people and stop wasting your time just for the sake of social stats: your customer or buyer does not care about your Klout Index, he cares about the quality, price and service and, may be, about your real you. I know a lot of people with nice stats and no sales and I know even more people without stats and a solid online income :-).

Don’t ask what you can do for the social network; ask what the social network can do for you!