If you are looking to grow your business by finding new leads on the internet, photography is a powerful resource that you should strongly consider incorporating into your strategy. The world is becoming more visual—and images significantly increase the chances of your content getting shared. One of the most important things that you can do is make a habit of putting hashtags on all of your photos. The reason for this is simple: hashtags allow your content to be found by people who are not already following you on social media. To see an example of how to do this, take a look at some of the photos on my Google+ page.
Think about keywords when shooting photos.
This is especially important if you hire a professional photographer to shoot still images. Before your shoot, think about the keywords that are relevant to your industry—and think about how you might be able to incorporate images that are an appropriate match for those keywords. For example, if you’re a CPA, the phrase “tax relief” might make a decent hashtag. You might think about how to set up a scene to convey the feeling of “relief” that you would then post to your Google+ page with the hashtag #taxrelief. Obviously, you can get creative with this and try a lot of different ideas. That’s generally how it goes with social media—you never know which pieces of content are going to be effective until you try it out.
Watch trending hashtags relative to your industry.
Hashtags.org keeps a live tally of hashtag statistics. Most of the time, there won’t be a whole lot of hashtags related to what your business does, but it’s worth checking in from time to time to see what’s going on. For example, at the time of this posting, the hashtag #wineoclock is trending. This is a good opportunity for a wine bar or a wine shop to tweet or post on Google Plus—especially if you think ahead about how to incorporate photography into the mix. You could take images of people drinking wine next to a clock. You can also invite your customers to upload their own photos as part of a Facebook contest. It all depends how much effort you want to put into it.
Hashtags help to boost the power of your photographic images by maximizing their exposure in front of the right audiences. If it sounds like there are a lot of possibilities and you’re not sure where to start, my best suggestion is to just play around with it and experiment. You’ll be surprised how well it can work.