Businesses are realizing that Social Media marketing is a must. They are getting out there, posting bite-sized 140 character updates to their following, hoping to turn fans into customers. But does photo sharing have a place in the business marketing playbook?
MarketMeSuite, the social media marketing dashboard primarily targeting small businesses users and social media mangagers, has now added a smart personal branding feature to the app that they're calling "Phto.me". When posting a Tweet or Facebook update, MarketMeSuite users can now attach a picture to their updates.
This isn't hosted by a third party provider; it's published to the users' own photo-stream on phto.me hosted and built by MarketMeSuite themselves. People looking at their pictures can then share, comment, or follow the user right there and them. This offers the small businesses using MarketMeSuite yet another valuable opportunity for social media branding and engagement.
If a tweet is worth 140 characters a picture is worth 10,000. Businesses are finding they need to show a human side to their Social Media efforts, and Phto.me offers them an interesting opportunity to present photos to their audience in a clean, uncluttered way.
As a first step to a fuller Bufferapp.com integration, MarketMeSuite chose the Buffer plugin as the sole tweeting plugin on Phto.me. Leo Widrich, CoFounder of Buffer said:
"I am thrilled to see this first integration between Buffer and MarketMeSuite happening. Especially as Photosharing has a huge potential I believe and such a clean version is a fantastic option."
Customer Participation
There have been a lot of successful marketing campaigns that featured customer submitted content. St. Helen's Farm, a popular goat milk brand in the UK encourages customers to submit photos of themselves drinking them milk with their story and they publish many of these photos on the back of the milk carton.
TheKitchn.com launched a successful "show us your table" as a Thanksgiving promotion all in an effort to drive more reader interaction.
What do you think?
The idea of being able to take customer submitted photos and have a clean place to host them and easily be able to upload them across social media channels seems like it could catch on pretty quickly...
There's no doubt you need to be a smarter marketer these days, but what do you think? Could this be another iron in the fire of your social media marketing strategy?
Phto.me Video: http://vimeo.com/25178761
Other important MarketMeSuite Phto.Me Press Release.