High-Quality images for you social shares

High-Quality images for you social shares

People respond more to visual content in comparison with text only content. 
This is a fact. 

The statics say you can get 600+ percent higher involvement in your social media posts if your post contains images and are not text only content. You will also get almost double the retweets on posts with pictures. More than 80 percent of all Facebook brand based interactions are made on photos. 

So there is no debating that photos can help you gain more engagement, visits and most importantly conversion! 
My question is: Where do you get all the pictures needed for a weekly posting session without stealing someone else's work? 

Big players out there hire professional photographs to produce tons of content for them, either by photographing their products in a gazillion different ways or by also hiring designers to photoshop everything into clever and cool image content. 

But not all of us have the budget to hire professional photographs and web designers to create all that unique content. This is why most of us turn to stock photography. Problem is, that a lot of free stock photography you will find out it is cheap and way to "generic" and although I personally can "smell" them from a mile away, most people don't actually care or notice this, for them, its all about the message sent. 

Watch out for Copyright

Seriously, before you post or modify any photo you may find online, always double check the copyright licenses behind them! You really don't want to get into legal problems over some images. Second, look for images and photos under "public domain" license which basically means you can do whatever your want, you can publish, distribute, modify or even use it to sell products. 

Another type of copyright images and photos may have:

• Creative Commons - You can share them under a certain set of rules
  
• Royalty-Free - One time buy, you can use it for commercial purposes after that. 
  
• Rights Managed - You can use them more than once. You have to pay additional costs every time you want to use the photo/image.
  

My top places for HIGH-quality free images and photos: 

1. Unsplash - Lots of photos plus a search engine which make a pretty good job at filtering whatever you need. You may not always find everything you want in an exact and specific way, but new photos are added every 10 days and chances are you can always find something to work with. 

2. Picjumbo - Similar to Unsplash, on Picjumbo you can filter photos by category. And you can find a pretty wide variety of photos. I usually search on both Picjumbo and Unsplash and choose the picture that fits the most for my post or social media share. 

3. Death to Stock - This is a little bit different from the first two websites. Here you just need to subscribe and you will get an email with 10 high-quality photos every month. You can choose a niche for the photos you may want to receive, but don't expect anything specific, the images can be pretty random and you may not always find exactly what you need, but they are free and good quality, you simply can't complain. 

It doesn't matter if you need them for your blog or for your online store. You will need image based content, there is no debating this. 
As for your social media campaigns, you will need A LOT OF image based content. It can help you tell your story in a simple way, hooking your desired audience. Just make sure you stay relevant to your brand or niche and always give people a call to action. 

Where do you get your stock photography? Let's share good sources with free content we can all use!