Social media is a fickle place. There is no room for a boring business. Platforms keep changing features and formats, and you’re competing for the attention of followers who are on multiple social sites, as well as with the 89% of other businesses who are active on social media.
Short attention spans and the growing competition, plus the accelerating demand for optimising your social media presence add up to a frenetic need for un-boring content. It’s crucial for businesses to avoid the stamp of “BORing,” spoken like only the bumbling Homer Simpson can.
Because when you’re a huge bore on social media, the only thing you’ll attract is the unfollow button.
One critical area to focus on is images. Here are some desperately needed image resources for fueling engagement and getting attention on social media. If you’re posting text without image content, then you might as well post computer code and hope a programmer out there is watching.
Give Your Images a Boost With These Free Resources
Free images with simple creative common license information is your solution for finding attractive visuals. No worrying about improper image use coming to haunt you one day with licensing nightmares and legal fines.
I’ve written about great free sources before, and even more free sources, and here are a few additional winners to give your online content a boost.
Don’t think aquarium or aluminum, think album upon album, and you’ve zeroed in on this catchy title and free image site. All the images are organized into albums, so there’s no specific photo search, just a like grouping by theme.
This is a useful tool when you find yourself looking for a group of photos with identical themes or settings, or photos taken by the same photographer for a uniform feel. This free photo site will allow you to share images under the CC 2.0 license, making attribution necessary, but it’s always a gracious gesture even if not required whenever the artist is known.
Yes, this is an actual site, with nearly 400,000 free photos and images to use as you wish, with only minor restrictions. See their license agreement for the full scoop.
This charitable phenomenon of stoking creatives with free images probably began long before Free Images got their footing, but I dare say they were one of the first. Enjoy the fruits, and if you’re dabbling in the photo-shooting arean, don’t be stingy. Share your bounty here.
This is exactly what you will find on this site. Good free photos to enhance your social media posts and give you new stunning landscape photos, most of which are located in the United States album.
Be sure to check out the textures album for some great background ideas for your images, all free to use on the public domain. It’s going to be a party on your platform with these freebies.
Don’t blame me when your image euphoria reaches its zenith. Blame Kaboompics and its brainchild creator and photographer Karolina Grabowska. She’s responsible for all the downloading photo-fun and creating you’ll have, because there’s nothing that screams free and beautiful all at the same time like this photo site.
So have at it, and don’t hesitate to report the lack of cats. It’s the one sad affair this site is having and it must end now.
“Free pics, no tricks” on this site, and you won’t be disappointed in the vast array of offerings. While there isn’t a search option, there are many categories to choose from, including some unusual delights, such as graffiti, doors, memes, and icons, logos and buttons.
They say you can use their pictures on anything, from books and posters to album covers and products, and even your toenails are open for business. But don’t stop there. I’m sure you can outdo them with application ideas. Just don’t let on that I encouraged you.
At 963 images and counting, Re:splash is a fabulous collection of free, high-def images from Crew, the same marketing team who does Unsplash, another free photo source. Apparently they’ve got a lot of free photos on their hands.
The search function is based on photo tags, and the growing collection features some of the most fascinating photography you’ll lay eyes on this side of the web. Get in the mood for something brilliant with their high-reaching, moody shots, and give your content something to shout about.
Generally speaking, you do not want to find your images with a Google image search. However, most people aren’t aware of a custom image search feature on Google. The trick is to follow your Google search with a couple more clicks.
Once you enter your search words, click on the “search tools” drop down, followed by “usage rights.” Then click on “labelled for reuse with modification” so your image search will only include those that you can use for free, commercial use. For each image, check for any other usage restrictions, such as attribution requirements.
There you go. You’ve just uncovered Google’s little free image secret.
Get to the search function by clicking on weekly images, then peruse the archives of images hand-picked by a husband and wife team. They wanted to see a public domain collection of high quality images on a site that is clean and image-focused, so they built this resource just for you.
See what’s for offer here and find some unexpected entertainment in the stories posted with some of the images, such as their surprise encounter with terrorists in Chicago that turned out to be the Transformer filmmaking shoot. You definitely won’t find boring here.
Stay tuned and get more ways to avoid boring on social media in the next post. I hope you’re up for it, because no one aspires to boring, not even politicians.