Flickr is considered one of the main social networking platforms of this decade. It is a highly indexed commercial website offered in 8 different languages and owned by Yahoo! Inc.
“It is an image and video hosting website, web services collection, and online community. In addition to being a popular website, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they insert in blogs and social media.”*1
Flickr is used as a search engine for people and artists, “It’s all about sharing photos or video with people you know. It is a simple easy-to-use website. You can use contacts to stay in touch with photographers you like, people who share your interests or your friends and family. See new stuff from your friends as soon as they arrive on Flickr. You can leave comments and notes too!”*2. Just like Facebook, Twitter, or any other e-social network, you can personalize your account and control who can see and interact with your photostream, by either making it public or keeping it private, so that only certain people can have access to your account. Having a public account is very beneficial for businesses.
Flickr benefits the business field widely, for “certain kinds of local businesses can take advantage of images that may show up when people search for keywords related to your business, especially travel-related businesses, clothing boutiques, photography businesses, some corporations, etc... Local business owners can share images on Flickr to boost their online brand and increase search engine visibility. Each photo page you create on Flickr will get indexed by the search engines and may even rank highly on its own”*3.
One of the main benefits which Flickr offers is the tag option. You can explore millions of geo-tagged photos which allow the viewer of the image to identify the place where the image has been taken .There’s also the normal tag-function with which you can tag a name or a keyword. You can explore these images by using dates as well.
Tags appear in a specific place. The more a specific word is mentioned, the bigger this word appears in the tag screen. Creating strong, keyword-rich, catchy, unique and descriptive titles for each photo motivates users to click on your image. Joining Flickr groups also increases the potential to drive additional traffic to your site. It helps to connect directly with locals in your area of service.
Flickr provides the user with detailed information about time, frequency and identity of who is viewing the images.
Not only free Flickr accounts are available, there are paid-for annual memberships of $24.95 which offer you with more capacity for uploading.
You can also create your own photo album and greeting cards and print them directly.
These are some main advantages of Flickr, but it has some disadvantages as well, like having to pay to get a wider capacity for images uploading, which is not very practical, especially for us Palestinians. Also sometimes the tags are misleading.
Using Flickr and learning about it is a necessity for everyone interested in business, arts or any other field. Flickr taught me how to take good photography shots. After finishing this assignment I learned how Flickr can offer me lots of information about specific people who can be good potential customers for my dream interior design business. People love socializing. It’s an easy normal everyday thing that we do; so the more we learn about Flickr, the more we learn from it. After all, social media is meant to be fun.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr *
2 http://www.flickr.com/
3 http://www.wilsonweb.com/seo/doerr-flickr.htm
4 http://www.ciao.co.uk/Flickr_com__6347999
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