Be a Social Media Game Changer: Royalty Free Images To The Rescue

Humans are driven by captivating visuals and the manner in which we interact online is no exception. Websites and social media pages should have consistent, high-quality and appropriate imagery that showcases your products or services. Out of all human contact, 93% is visual. Via the visual system, two-thirds of all inputs enter the brain and our brain processes visual information 60,000 times more rapidly than text alone. Think about how much you scroll through your own feed and go right past a text message, but stop at an image, graphic, or video.

However, good visuals often come at a certain cost. In this post, we will put forth some cost effective ‘royalty free’ image sites that you can use to elevate your social media game. This means that you can reuse or edit these photos for your needs such as social media posts and website images.

You can download images without creating an account. You do need an account to use the other features Pexels offers. Accounts are required for actions such as “liking” photos, following photographers, and collecting pictures.Photos on Pexels use two types of licenses: the Pexels License, and the Creative Commons license (CC0). Both types allow you to use, edit, and adapt the photos for commercial use. You are also not required to publicly credit the photographer, but it’s still a nice thing to do.

Unsplash allows photographers to upload photos to its website, which are then curated by a team of photo editors. Before June 2017, photos uploaded to Unsplash were made available under the Creative Commons zero license, which allowed individuals to freely reuse, repurpose and remix photos for their own projects. This was changed in June 2017, and photos are now made available under the Unsplash copyright license, which imposes some additional restrictions.

Unsplash doesn't offer the sheer volume of choice as some paid sites, but the photos are top-quality and thousands are added every day. Chances are high that on this free stock platform, you can find something to work with.

Pixabay is a little more business and marketing focused than Unsplash, which is also useful for content marketers and bloggers. Another major benefit of Pixabay is that free vectors and illustrations are also offered.To ensure a high quality standard and avoid legal issues, all uploaded images are checked manually by Pixabay's staff members.

Envato are one of the biggest online providers of digital assets.The Envato Elements membership will give you access to over880,000 photos and a host of other digital assets including fonts and videos. What is particularly pleasing is the quality of the images included. You'll come across several low-quality images , videos and graphics if you dig deep into a lot of stock image websites. To increase their number of items, Envato could have added more items, but instead, they have placed quality controls in place to ensure that each item is actually worth downloading and using. You can use Envato for free with restrictions, but it’s worth getting a membership for all that the website offers.

Imagery is certainly an important part of social media strategies, but ask yourself two primary questions the next time you go to publish - "Is my chosen picture appropriate to the post?" and "Does my imagery represent the brand of my company and how I want to see it?" ”.Using relevant images on social media allow you to gain attention, build loyalty, communicate vital information, and increase engagement. If you want to stand out, develop a visual brand identity. Your brand will have more staying power when you remain consistent and associate photos with your marketing message.