Twitter photo tags could work for your brand.
If you had 241 million users of your service you’d be quite happy right? Wrong! Twitter’s growth is not quite as meteoric as they’d like. So. If this was your business what would you do? Correct, you’d copy a competitor. That appears to be what Twitter had in mind when they launched Twitter photo tags at the end of March 2014.
This means that Twitter doesn’t look dissimilar to Facebook and Instagram.
Not everyone is chuffed to pieces about that. But that aside, how do you do it? Check out the ‘Who’s in this photo?’ button that pops up in the compose screen once your photo is securely attached and ready to go. If you go to settings you can sort privacy options or notifications regarding the people you can tag so no worries there. Twitter photo tags don;t have to be ‘Big Brother’ but use them judiciously would be our advice.
If on the other hand you feel ‘creeped out’ by the concept do not fear.
Privacy settings can be turned on so the default’ Allow anyone to tag me ‘ is disabled. You can also restrict it to people who follow you only and you can untag yourself if needs be. All you do is tap the dots, there are three and choose ‘remove tag from photo’. If you have your account on private you can only tag people you follow and protected accounts mean people cannot tag at all. That is the same for anyone you might have blocked. So you have control of Twitter photo tags if you take care with your settings.
So why should any of this affect those using twitter for business? Here’s Leadamo’s take on what tagging might achieve when marketing your brand.
6 ways to use Twitter’s new photo tags for your business
First of all you are now able to tag up to 10 people in a photo. You might think this irrelevant to a business user. But think again. Originally it was necessary to add participants of the photo into the tweet. That’s fine but by the time every twitter handle was added what space was left? Now that has changed. You can ‘group selfie’ your brand to your heart’s content.
1.You can also make a splash by including more images in a tweet. Why post one photo when four always looks better? Their collage option will make all Picmonkey Marmosets very happy indeed. You will be delighted to know those four image collages can now be tweeted in one message – ah, bliss. Actually all you need to do is choose four images and twitter does the rest. It looks like Picmonkey needs to respond with a killer sucker punch. You can see the possibilities for brands who can really add visibility by using multiple images of products, events, places and people.
2.We all lose sight of tweets in the moment after all Twitter is about ‘now’ not yesterday. But these new photo tags will allow any brand to index photos and know who they are in the future. This might well prove useful when you curate content over time. It also helps the photo gallery feature Twitter added some time ago.
3.One of the main criticisms of twitter for discovery purposes is well, it’s never been that easy to find people to follow. It’s not a matter of finding people but knowing why you might want to invest a click in following them. After all, we always want to know what’s in it for us – sad but very true. So, if you tag your photos these tags will be prominent in tweets on the web too. So you will be creating your very own brand archive, neatly labeled too.
4. Don’t dismiss this idea of image tags. The meteoric photo that was retweeted just over 1.2 million times in less time than 60 minutes; that’s some speed. So what would generate such interest? It was Ellen DeGeneres for her extraordinary pic with a few people she bumped into: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep and others. You get the picture! (see what I did there?)
5.Use pics when embedding testimonial tweets. If someone is happy for their image to be used you can add a tag to a testimonial which gives more evidence this person is ‘real’ (open to abuse of course but a possibility) You can then embed those tweets with images on a website. It could be someone using your product even. It might be worth adding an incentive by asking customers to upload a photo to receive a discount code or voucher. The possibilities are endless.
6. How about using it to promote your customer service/ relations office? This gives a personal touch and people can see just who they are complaining to and makes the whole process more human and less impersonal and might even cut down stress and hostility.
Just think what a Twitter photo tag could do for your brand. It beats those awful ‘thanks to all my re tweet’ tweets over stuffed with names that get shared endlessly and for what purpose I say? At least we have some eye candy which, after all, was always missing from Twitter. Yes, it may look like Facebook or Instagram but it’s Twitter and we use it for news. Newspapers rely on images so why shouldn’t twitter and why shouldn’t your business? Here’s to the next 241 million users and a few more customers for small businesses.