Post 4: A Peak at Flickr! - Widespread Use, or Niche Tool?

Purpose and Solved Problems

Since its creation in 2004, Flickr has changed hands many times, most recently being acquired by SmugMug.  Flickr can host videos, but is mostly known for its use as an image hosting service.  Many professional and amateur photographers use Flickr to display their work and to get their artistic vision or message out there.  Users are offered multiple tiers of accounts as well as ways to manage photos, interaction with other users, and ways to manage favorited photos.

Beth Gasser, Vice President of VividImage, offers a multitude of creative ways to use Flickr for business reasons, especially for smaller businesses.  Some key points she offers up, include that of the use of stock photography, which when a suitable image is found, can be utilized in previously blogged about social media forms, such as Blogger!  Flickr acts as a terrific way to enhance a company’s current portfolio of social media platforms (Gasser 1).  Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of Flickr comes from its ability to tell a story, and to integrate with a marketing department with ease.  Instead of a marketing department having to ask an already busy business professional for photos, an archive of photos has already been built up for use at a later time. One can show behind the scenes information, that customers may enjoy getting to see (Flickr 1).

Attempting to use Flickr

Creating a user account is easy enough, however, one issue that I have always had with Flickr is its constant changing in how to do simple features of the website.  I’ve only been away from Flickr a few months, yet the way to upload photos has changed yet again (I suspect much of this must do with the changing ownership).  Once taking a few minutes to get familiar with the interface, uploading, viewing, and favoriting pictures is simple enough via the desktop and app. 

It should be noted that upload speeds are a bit slower than YouTube for videos by about a minute (I tried uploading the same video from the YouTube post).  But it’s nothing unmanageable.  Editing and tagging photos/videos is also an intuitive process that works well for ensuring content reaches the maximum number of users possible, but editing prior to Flickr upload is highly recommended.

Flickr Features

Flickr offers different account types based on need, Free (one terabyte of storage total, maximum video length of 3 minutes), Ad Free, which is the same as a Free account type, but without ads (paid annually) and Doublr, which has, “double” the storage as a free account (Wikipedia).  Content within Flickr can be organized into albums, slideshows, and by tag, and what I consider to be one of the best features, a single photo can be assigned to multiple albums, allowing maximum user control over organization.

User content can also be managed to control who can and can’t see certain photos.  Integration with a Blog is another excellent tool, especially if a company is looking to start a focused and driven social media department.  Flickr writes, “if you have a cameraphone and a blog, you can post directly to your blog from your phone in one easy step” (Flickr 1).  Photos from an event can also be shared and combined even content from different users, allowing complete and comprehensive coverage of an important event.

My Experience

Flickr is something that I can’t recommend to every user, as upon further review, I feel as if Flickr appeals to a very niche market that not every user needs.  A Twitter or Facebook may suit that user better than Flickr ever could.  While I enjoy it, I own a camera that I take lots of pictures with and love to interact with other photos and visions.  As for purpose of Flickr, it serves its userbase quite well, and knows how it wants to target and market to its audience.

From the perspective of a business or business professional, Flickr can act as a repository of photos for the marketing team to reference and utilize.  This allows a business to be able to tell its story better, and interact with customers on a more personal level.  Whether that be showing employees working in a happy setting, or a satisfied customer’s photo getting shown, or as a place to find recent company event photos, Flickr is versatile in the business setting.  For that reason, I believe that Flickr is a powerful tool whose usefulness can be enhanced by integrating it with other forms of social media.  However, I do believe that Flickr is best served as a personal photography site, due to other options to reach customers on a larger scale.  If  you look at professional sports teams, businesses, etc on Flickr (such as Cleveland's Lake Erie Monsters) you will see that posts have a fraction of the amount of interaction that is found on other social media.  To summarize, Flickr is great for the personal photographer, but not as great of an option for businesses for advertising, rather it should act as a repository for business photos. 

A Photo from my Flickr of BGSU Hockey

Sources

Flickr. Flickr, Yahoo!, www.flickr.com/bestpractices.

“Flickr.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 May 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr.

Gasser, Beth. “5 Creative Ways to Use Flickr for Business.” Vivid Image, Inc., 3 Nov. 2017, vimm.com/5-creative-ways-to-use-flickr-for-business/.