Images – the Joy and the Pain!

We’ve all heard the hackneyed phrase, “An image is worth a thousand words” but research indicates its still true and they are very important when doing any sort of social content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc all of them are reliant on images to capture the attention and provide context.
But… there are some huge issues with images and this article will help you avoid some of the traps and given you some free tools to make images a little easier to use.

1. Copyright.
   It still astonishes me how many businesses use images found in a google search and don’t consider copyright or they realise it’s a problem but think, no one will know. Wrong. If you do some quick googling of some of the bigger stock image firms you will find the web littered with examples of people talking about being sued by these companies who are acting to protect their rights and the rights of the photographer / illustrator. These are very large, wealthy companies and they use the law to punish misuse and they are very, very vigorous.
   How do they find the images? They have software written to do matching of their stock to yours images. If they find a match the software checks your company against that image’s licencing. No match = legal action. Morale here is buy the images or take / create the image yourself or have someone take/create it for you.
2. Image Sizing.
   Even when you have the right image your problems aren’t over yet. You need to ensure it’s the right size with respect to dimension, resolution and file size. Just because an application will accept the image doesn’t mean you have done it correctly. This becomes particularly evident when clients use their social feeds on their website which is a great idea but with large images you now have a very large overhead and your website load speeds drop.
   How do you fix it?

Read this article to see how to modify the images to suit the various social feeds and your website. It even touches on appropriate approaches to SEO treatment of images. Check it out here: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-optimize-social-media-images/