Posted by Claire Burdett 
Children at the Sari Weaving village. http://www.flickr.com/photos/scadcharity/5937335156/in/set-72157627113902397
Flickr is a great resource and is very useful for visually rich businesses, which charities tend to be, whether that is because of their subject matter or what people are doing to raise money to help.
As such it should be treated as an integral part of your social good organisation’s social media strategy and activity, helping to inform, educate and drive the emotional responses that lead to donations or involvement. As an additional extra, adding it in to the mix will help your search rankings if done correctly.
Like everything, however, it has to be used correctly to get the maximum benefit online, whether for business, charities, or Social Enterprise organisations.
Here are a few top tips to help you leverage the potential of Flickr for your business, social enterprise, charity or not for profits organisation:
- Content – Use original content that are relevant to your message and goals, achievements and organisation, such as photos of what you are achieving, charitable activities, behind-the-scenes images and historical photos.
- Tag it – Make sure that every image or video is properly titled, with descriptions and metatags, for maximum SEO potential. Flickr makes it easy to edit this information for a batch of photos as well as allowing you to doing it singly. Just unloading the image and leaving on the camera’s image name eg IMG_0001.jpg is wasting an opportunity to improve your organisation’s online profile and also looks very unprofessional.
- Do More With Less – Don’t have more than one Flickr account for your organisation unless there is a really compelling reason to do so, as it dilutes the search potential and well increasing confusion, but do file your images and videos in Groups within that one account complete with a description that incorporates your keywords.
- Groups – Share your images or videos in relevant Flickr Groups, and get involved in Group discussions as well as outreaching to other Group members’ shared images and video. If you want to create your own group that reflects your organisations interests Flickr allows you to create official Sponsored Groups, such as Kellogg’s Moments of Motherhood Group where users share motherhood-related images: http://www.flickr.com/groups/momentsofmotherhood/
- Relationships – Just as in any other social network, building relationships is important. Outreach to other Flickr members in your sphere by favouriting their content and/or commenting on their pictures or video. This helps build links and a community around your shared purpose or interest.
- Go Pro – a Pro account increases the amount of content you can upload per month, and gives you access to increased analytics, which is always helpful. Posting smaller sized images will also help you retain control of how and where they are used.
- Share – Regularly share your Flickr content on other social networks, such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to maximise the social links surrounding your organisation/brand online.
- Be Savvy – Don’t just use Flickr for your photographs as it is open source; do think about only uploading minimal sized images so that their reuse is restricted; make sure the ones you do upload there are actually hosted elsewhere, such as on your company’s website, as Flickr’s terms and conditions state: “pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr. This provides a way to get more information about the content and the photographer.”
At The Media Marketing Co we work with many Social Enterprises, Charities and Not for Profits Organisations to help them raise their profiles and increase donations. If you would like further information contact claire@themediamarketingco.com.
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