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Five Reasons To Pic And Roll

In basketball, the pick and roll is a standard tactic used to free up a shooter from his defender. In social media, pictures are becoming an equally decisive means of gaining competitive advantage, freeing up marketers to tell their stories without a thousand words. The explosive growth of photo-sharing sites and apps like Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram is further testimony to this trend, making these 5 reasons for marketers to “pic and roll” a slam dunk.

Let your photos do the talking

While we all seem to be too busy to read, we still find the time to review pictures from friends and family. Recognizing this, Facebook recently revamped their photo display to feature larger pictures and their attached comments more easily. Brands are capitalizing on the rising power of pics too, by encouraging fans to submit their photos via contests on Facebook and using infographics to make complex stories easy -- and even enjoyable -- to peruse.

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You should be in pictures

Although the word is grossly overused in social media, engagement is, in fact, a critical reason for brands to get into pictures in a big way. Content is still king, but it is no longer limited to the written word. Images are the new vehicle for sharing ideas around one concept or topic. You can reach out to consumers by commenting on their images to share insights and show your appreciation of their comments on your own images. You can also share images of your passionate and loyal consumers.

Picture this: more site traffic

Pinterest’s most remarkable stat is not that it now has over 20 million users who each spend 98 minutes a month on the site. No, more incredible is that the photo-sharing phenom now refers more traffic to other sites than LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ combined. This means that by adding more photos to their Web site and blogs, and then “pinning” them on Pinterest, which automatically creates a link back to the images’ origin, marketers can count on more visitors dropping by without paying for the privilege.

Focus on your target

The beauty of photo sharing is that it has both mass and niche appeal. On Tumblr, a whopping 2 million photos are shared each day on every topic imaginable. Brands like Huggies, Coke and even IBM are taking advantage of this activity to reach their respective audiences. The opportunity to micro-target is especially strong on Pinterest, as evidenced by a recent Kotex campaign that targeted 50 “inspiring” women, who, in turn, shared the brand interaction with their sizeable networks. 

There's nothing negative about revenue

As I have already mentioned, Pinterest is a site traffic-referring machine. What I didn’t add is that many e-retailers are turning this traffic into revenue.

A recent study suggested that visitors referred from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy something and spend 10% more on average than visitors who arrive from other social networks. And now that Pinterest is encouraging brands to pin their own images (for copyright reasons among others), marketers can feel free to share every image they have on relevant “boards.” 

If you would like to see how a wide range of marketers are doing the “pic and roll” on Pinterest, feel free to click on over to this Pinterest board.

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