Photo sharing apps and platforms can be a great way to promote your business, showcase your professional photography, and curate a shareable portfolio. Whether you’re hoping to find the right place to showcase your photographs or are looking for a platform to share your images with existing clients, here is a breakdown of the best apps for sharing photos as a professional photographer: 

• Flickr

Flickr is one of the world’s most popular photo sharing apps with 112 million registered users. It is also the photo sharing app favoured by professional and amateur photographers alike. One of the main benefits of using Flickr is that it is extremely user-friendly. Whether you’re looking to post and share your photos or sell and store them, you will find it very straightforward to do this on Flickr. Although Flickr is a free app, when you spend $60 per year on Flickr Pro, there is no limit to the number of images you can save and store in your account. 

1. Imgur

Imgur is a content hosting app, but unlike Flickr, it doesn’t focus just on photography. Users can share GIFs, memes and videos as well as traditional photographic images. One of the most appealing aspects of using Imgur is its popularity. In 2019, Imgur was receiving approximately 274 million visits per month, making it one of America’s most popular websites. Imgur tends to appeal to a much younger audience than other photo sharing apps. 

• Unsplash 

Unsplash is an app focused solely on beautiful photography, and as well as allowing photographers to share their images it provides free-to-use, high-definition photos for editorial use, commercial use and personal use. Whilst the idea of giving away your images may not be appealing to some professional photographers, if you’re new to the sector then using Unsplash is a great way to promote yourself and grow your reputation in the industry.

• Behance 

Behance is owned by Adobe, and the primary aim of this app is to create a platform where both professionals and amateurs can share and discover creative work. Whilst this creative work can take many forms, photography is one of the most popular on the platform. Behance is considered a superior portfolio website for both photographers and artists. 

• YouPic

Finally, YouPic is a photography portal that works in a very similar way to Flickr, but without any of the restrictions. With YouPic you can personalise your cover picture and profile picture, allowing you to give your account an identity that aligns with your professional brand. Whilst this is a relatively new app, it is one that is growing rapidly in popularity. 

Conclusion 

Making use of photo sharing apps is a great way to promote your business and reach a wider audience for your photography skills and services. The more tools you have in your armoury to promote your professional photography, the more successful your business is likely to be. As well as displaying your photographs via photo sharing apps, offering other services, such as the QR code image sharing offered by EventsAlbum, will only enhance the value of your brand and the number of services that you can offer to your client base. 

When you’re promoting your brand at an exhibition, trade show, or any other event, it is important not only that you attract visitors, but also that you engage with them once they’re at your stand. If you don’t have the tools to engage your visitors, then they won’t spend very long at your stand or spend long thinking about your brand. This would be a wasted opportunity. But how can you engage visitors at your event stand? Here are our three top tips: 

Provide an Interactive Element 

Visitors cannot engage with your event stand unless you provide them with something to engage with. For this reason, every good event stand should have some kind of interactive element. For some brands, the right interactive element will be easy to identify: a ball throwing competition if you’re promoting a ball game, for example, or a digital quiz to promote your online brand. For some products, you may have to think a little more outside the box to identify the right interactive element for you. Popular options include digital games, augmented reality, digital quizzes, surveys and social media interaction. There is a whole industry dedicated to providing interactive technology for exhibits and events and, if your budget allows, these can be a great way to boost your visitor engagement. 

Gather Imagery 

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, which is certainly true when promoting your event stand, particularly on social media. Encouraging your visitors to take photos of your stand and your products is a great engagement technique. But you could elevate this engagement by using EventsAlbum to gather those photos taken by your guests and then use their images for your own promotion. EventsAlbum is an online album where your guests can easily share all their photos from your event by scanning a prominently displayed QR code. Not only is this a great and affordable form of visitor engagement, but it also helps you to generate an abundance of images of your event stand from a wide range of different perspectives. To further enhance this engagement on a tight budget, and encourage your visitors to use your EventsAlbum QR code, why not have a competition for the best photo taken at the event, with the winner receiving a small prize? 

Demonstrations and Giveaways 

Finally, everyone loves a freebie, and event visitors will historically make a beeline for stands where exhibitors are giving away products. These can be as small as sweets and stationery or as large as USB sticks and water bottles, depending on your brand and your budget. Once you have a captive audience attracted by your freebies, why not use this as an opportunity to demonstrate your product? Product demonstrations are also popular and will help you gain the interest of passersby, engage with visitors, and increase footfall to your stand. These two techniques often work well in conjunction with each other, though if your budget is small you could opt to use either demonstrations or giveaways, rather than a combination of both. 

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situation. It is also a phenomenon seen, and term used, when individuals on social media engage with or buy from businesses because they see evidence (in the form of photographs, posts and videos) that someone else is engaging with that business. For this reason, social media engagement is an increasingly valuable and powerful tool for businesses.

Here’s how you can use photographs to take social proof to the next level for your business: 

The Benefits of Customers Sharing and Tagging Images 

Social media is an easy and affordable way to help your business be seen by a wider audience, which is why it is such a popular tool with businesses of all sizes. 

Some of the benefits of your customers tagging you in their images and posts include: 

• It guarantees that you will see the imagery. Businesses are alerted when someone tags them on social media, and this is a great way to ensure that you are aware of conversations taking place about your brand, as well as enabling you to be a part of them. 
• Tags increase customer engagement. If you establish your own tag such as #eventsalbum, and other people are following that tag then not only will they see your business content, but they will also see how other customers are engaging with you. Thanks to the concept of social proof, this is likely to grow their own engagement and encourage them to utilise your services themselves. 
• When you are tagged in a photo or video, you can retag this to your own account, effectively giving you free and engaging social media content. You can also use those images within your own social media and marketing campaigns, creating a wealth of valuable, user-generated content that is more likely to be trusted by your customers than the content you have created independently. Research has found that the majority of social media users looking for product information prefer posts from other consumers (51%) than from review sites, newspapers and magazines, or the brand itself. 

Using EventsAlbum 

However, whilst there are many benefits of being tagged in customer images, this also comes with limitations. The small size and low resolution of images saved to social media means that it would be difficult for you to use these images in your own social media or marketing campaigns. And approaching your customers for a higher-resolution version of the image can be both time-consuming and awkward. 

The solution to this problem is to use a service such as EventsAlbum. If you are able to send out a QR code to your clients so they can submit their images, rather than ask them to email them to you directly, then this will serve two purposes: making it less of an awkward exchange with customers you don’t know as well as giving you access to the original higher resolution photos at full size. This means that you are able to use those images on your site or social media. This could be mutually beneficial for B2B companies as it means both can take advantage of promotion and social proof where an image is used. However, all businesses could benefit from this system, streamlining the process of gaining high-resolution images from their customers, and making their customer engagement more professional and easier to access.