It’s no secret that images increase the success of any marketing content on the web. In many ways, the images you pick are as important as the content itself, maybe more so. But high quality stock photos cost a lot of money and free stock photos in the internet are difficult to find. Let me introduce a business tech tool or a website that I think you should know about. I use it dozens of times every single week and I’m sure once you find out about it, you’ll be using it too.
Use Images on Your Social Media Posts to Increase Engagement
Now, we’re becoming more of a visual society, and that’s evident in terms of our social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. All can benefit from using images. In fact, stats show that if you have a post with an image on social media, you’re likely to get two times more engagement than having a text post alone. We were with the social media expert named Nick Bowditch. He went so far as to say, “If you don’t have an image in your social media post, you may as well not post at all.” That’s how strongly he feels about it. For those reasons I think it’s important that you learn about how to find images, which you can use in your social media posts.
Find Images that are Royalty Free
Not just any images, because we know that most of the images we get from Google search are from other people. We don’t have the rights to use those images, and we might get in trouble if we do so. We want to steer well clear of any Google images, and find images that are what’s called “royalty free.” Meaning, there is no payment required in using the images.
Visual Hunt: A Home for Free Images
Let’s talk about my favorite website for finding royalty free images. There are a lot of different websites out there, and I’ve tried many of them. My favorite one is called Visual Hunt. You can find it on the website visualhunt.com. On the website, you’ll find over 354 million images that are available, and are under something called ‘creative commons.’ There are different versions of creative commons. You can go through the list and check which ones are available for commercial use. There are millions of images searchable in every single topic. Using Visual Hunt is like doing a google search. There’s a beautiful big search bar and you type in literally anything that you want.
Search through Images which are available for Commercial Use
We’ll go to the website right now so you can see. Let’s type in “Business Meeting” for example, then hit enter. Wait a few moments, then you’ll see hundreds or even thousands of photos about business meetings readily available for you to use. All of these images are royalty free. Now to confirm that, if you see a particular image that you like. Click on it and look for the license agreement. Most of the images are free. But I just happened to land on one that is not available for commercial use. However, you can get rid of the pictures which we can’t use by ticking on the “Commercial Use” button at the top left part of the page. It will now narrow down your selection to the images that you can use.
Select and Download Images at the One Stop
Let’s just say I have an event coming up and I want to have an image that would show what it’s like to be in a room of people. I search for images and click “Commercial Use.” Then I can actually download that image in any quality or resolution that I’d like. Another sample, if I have a blog about health and nutrition, I would search images about food. I’ll just do the same process of search, click “Commercial Use,” then download the image in the size of my preference.
Choose Images that fit the Colors of Your Brand
Another fun thing about this website is the color palette which you can use to match the unique colors of your personal brand. You may use them as backgrounds, and you can add on words to match your company branding. Say for example, because we’re Business Blueprint, we’re going to pick the color blue. Now, we’re going to find a whole bunch of images where blue is the dominant color. That’s kind of a handy way to be able to search for images matching your particular brand color.
Visual Hunt vs Shutterstock & iStock
We’re going to wrap up this video right now. I’ve just shown you how to literally find millions of royalty free images that you can use. There’s, of course, photo libraries out there like Shutterstock and iStock, but there you might be paying $200 a month for subscriptions to those. The one I’ve just shown you is absolutely free.
Do you know other awesome free stock photo sites? Tell us in the comments section below.
