Social Media Art

Citroen in Wawalnica, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

When you create your blog, website or other social media page it really helps if you make it distinctive. But why?

The world is full of pages that get few hits for many reasons. While it is essential to have content that is both relevant and interesting, and to ensure it gets seen by your potential audience, it is worth considering the wider meaning of 'seen'.

While your content might be the best, and you can get it to rank highly in the search engines, will people want to start reading? You know how it is, you do a search, see some interesting pages listed, and you open several at once before choosing the most likely to read. Is your page interesting enough visually to beat the other pages in grabbing the reader's attention?

Getting the right layout and images is like remembering to wear a suit to an interview. Yes, the suit should not matter - but it does. We all make our first and most vital assessment visually because we all have many choices to make in life - and we often need to make them quickly. The result is that we rely on our first impressions over and over again.

With the rise in the use of digital camera and image editing software, there is now a wealth of imagery from which to choose. However, if you are not making good choices, other people will be; it is a competitive world.

The good news is that a lot of the imagery is free to use if you are not using it to promote a product. The image I am using here is mine, a low resolution version of an artwork I keep on Flickr for people like you to use on social media sites. You must always check the licensing on am image to make sure you can use it for your purpose, and writing to tell the owner what you are doing is both polite and an opportunity to get your page seen (yes, I will go and check how my images are being used). You should also make sure there is some link back to the source page of any image you use.

Remember that image owners can use a number of tools these days to check where there images are appearing on the net, including simply sliding a copy of an image from their webpage into Google Images and seeing what turns up.

If your social media is used to sell products and services then you can always approach the image owner and talk about buying a right to use the image.

At the end of the day, your imagery should say something meaningful about what you want your page to say, and to say it quickly, before someone else's says it first.