In May 2011, GigaOm founder, Om Malik, published an article entitled “The Democratization of Distribution,” which detailed how the rise of Twitter fundamentally changed the role of media companies who were once the gatekeepers of news and attention. Empowered by Twitter, anyone had the tools to become a journalist, introducing, impacting, and amplifying news in real-time. We saw just how powerful this news revolution was during the Arab Spring.
Power to the People
Now a new revolution is taking place, this time around visual social content. In the same way that Twitter profoundly changed the news, the exponential rise of user photos and videos has deeply altered the way consumers experience brands. For the first time, visual sharing platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Facebook and Snapchat are allowing customers to play a critical role in defining brand experience and identity. While the voice of the customer has always been one of the most powerful concepts in marketing, it was typically text driven and dictated or heavily moderated by brands. Now that has changed. Customers have the power to visually define brands, amplifying their experience and influencing their peers, all with a simple photo or video share.
Why Brands Should Care
According to Mary Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends report, over 1.8 billion photos are uploaded per day to major social media platforms. That means by the time you finish reading this article, about 5 million photos will be shared on the internet. Clearly, there is no shortage of photos and the rate of photo sharing is still growing.
What’s less obvious is the cultural shift around social photos that makes them more useful to brands than ever before. Millennials have grown up armed with smartphones and are already accustomed to the world of social sharing. Today, photo and video sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat are about communication—a visual blog for the people, places, and things that we love. As a result, today’s photos are much more likely to be brand affiliated. So why does this matter? What’s the value in a photo of new shoes shared to a few friends?
The answer is much more than you think. Each photo or video is an authentic visual endorsement for your brand. When someone tags a brand, they are actively sharing a positive experience with the world. Think the power of good consumer reviews (i.e., Yelp or TripAdvisor) but amplified 10, 100, even 1000 times (depending on your social network). For a brand, each piece of affiliated content is a unique opportunity to influence a purchasing decision.
I’m not alone in this mindset. At Pixlee, we've seen many of our customers use these photos as authentic visual reviews. E-commerce companies like Rent the Runway have used customer images to increase conversion up to 200%. And that effect is intensified when those photos come from friends and peers. The ultimate goal for most brands is to establish a loyal and strong community of buyers. User photos play a key role in this process because it is extremely difficult for brands to imitate this kind of authentic content.
Understand Consumers Like Never Before
For brands, there’s an added bonus to this behavior shift in consumers. Historically, marketing teams have had to rely on surveys, focus groups and projection models to understand their customers. In this new age of Big Data and mobile, the amount of customer information available to brands has exploded. Each post, picture, and video comes packed with metadata about the post and the user. This includes captions, hashtags, @tags, location data, demographic data and more. Brands can use this data to inform their marketing in a way that makes a real difference to their customers. They can celebrate die-hard fans and highlight evangelists, connecting with the buyers on a whole new level.
With Instagram and Twitter, I can post a training photo and 10 minutes later have Nike wish me luck on my next race. Does that make me feel closer to Nike? You bet it does. Not only do I feel connected, but Nike now understands more about me as a brand advocate.
What’s Next
In the same way that Twitter changed the news world, this visual revolution is changing the balance of power between people and brands. Smart brands know better than to fight the explosion of brand-attributed photos and videos. The most successful brands will evolve to take advantage of this behavior and use it in their favor. The very best will use it to convert customers into brand champions who love their brand even more than they love their products.
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