Posting photos to Twitter through services like Twitpic and Posterous has become really popular with the iPhone set, for good reason — illustrating your twitter stream with on-the-scene snapshots definitely adds personality to one’s twitter presence.
My problem with this practice, until now, has been that I’d rather store my photos in one all-purpose, does-everything-well online service than have them scattered over various services that do different things. I’m a confirmed Flickr user for my own photos. And at this point many organizations have substantial treasure (and investment) in Flickr — examples include the American Red Cross, The Nature Conservancy, and NRDC. (Note: very likely, many individuals staffers within your org have Flickr accounts and may well be posting job-related pix, too… What? You haven’t yet surveyed your staff re where they’re present on the social web?? Get crackin.)
With yesterday’s announcement of a new Flickr-to-Twitter integration feature, the photo service has finally given users a long-overdue You got chocolate in my peanut butter! moment. Problem solved, for me — and I think the same goes for nonprofits/businesses active on both Flickr and Twitter. As others have observed, it’s true that twitpic offers richer functionality, but my guess is that most Flickr folk will happily trade that for the simplicity of working out of one service.
Highly recommended for nonprofits: Start salting your twitter stream(s) with choice and/or timely Flickr-hosted content that’s relevant to whatever else you’re tweeting. ESPECIALLY if you’re smartphone-equipped and are live-tweeting from an interesting event or location.
Doing this will give your storytelling and presence on Twitter immediacy, and I think it’ll increase interest in any related web materials you may link to in tweets fore and aft a Flickr image.
If you take up this practice, one more thing to consider: when you upload each photo to Flickr, be sure to include a good caption in the “description” field, and include links to related URLs on your own website(s) — blog posts, press releases, reports & other policy/background materials, web features, etc. Doing so will give anyone drawn in by Twitter a more satisfying experience of the photo. And it will give that viewer somewhere to go, once they’ve looked at the picture on Flickr.
One further reminder: If you really want to get the most out of the assets you upload to Flickr, put the extra minutes into:
- giving each photo a good title
- meaningful tags
- geotags if appropriate
- a good description as described above
- Creative Commons noncommercial share-alike licensing.
And organize your assets into meaningful Sets and Collections. It takes a little more time to do all this, and when pinched for time you may want to leave some of these tasks for periodic housekeeping visits to Flickr when your schedule allows. But it really is worth it — your photos (and videos) will be discovered by many more people who’re searching Flickr in different ways, and you’ll also be able to do a lot more with your photos — for example, you can embed slideshows in blog posts or microsites that display all the photos in a Set, or all photos with a particular tag etc.