Making our threads more 'shareable' - Marketing Drivel

Sorry, I know I'm all like - "Marketing, link building, networking, blah blah blah!"

It's annoying, and totally not permaculture-y, and I'm very sorry.

But oh my word, if you want to infect brains, marketing is just the bees knees. I'd like to discuss making our threads more social media friendly.

Basically what that entails is just putting a nice image (that we own the rights to or that is free to use, of course) in our posts when we create new topics. This makes the thread more shareable when we go to post it to our Facebook page or something, and ultimately, draws more attention to the discussion.

You can either use an image you or someone else has given you permission to use, or you can do a search in Google for images without ownership or copyrights on them.

To do this, just do an image search for what you want, then go to advanced search. Go to the bottom of those options, and from there select either 'free to use or share' or 'free to use, share or modify', depending on whether you plan to edit the picture at all.

I believe the ideal images for a Facebook post are generally 600x800, but Christina will likely know more about that - please correct me if I'm wrong.

For posts on other sites I've done in the past, I've sometimes created shareable images with images I can modify and use without paying for. I usually use Pixlr Express Image Editor to create these images, it's handy, it's easy to use, and it's free. I have it listed in the Tools of the Interwebs thread.

The image at the top of this post is one that I've created - it's relevant to the topic, and when shared, it tells the readers what the article is about at a glance. Generally, anything with an image is just more shareable.

Ultimately making our content easier and more visually appealing for sharing is going to help us reach more people, and that's just super

For a more in depth look, here's an article from BuzzSumo I really like on engineering viral content. That's a little bit off base from what we would do in a forum, but there's a nice section in there on shareable images.

Destiny Hagest wrote:Sorry, I know I'm all like - "Marketing, link building, networking, blah blah blah!"

It's annoying, and totally not permaculture-y, and I'm very sorry.

If you'll consider my advice, it would be "Never apologize for marketing." Because I don't feel that marketing per se needs any apology. It's vital, these days, to just about every economic or educational enterprise of any scale whatsoever.

My own rule of thumb is that if I feel the need to apologize for a particular bit of marketing, it's a sign that I ought to redesign that bit until it's better. The best marketing in the world is the marketing that the target audience never noticed was marketing at all.

Destiny Hagest wrote:
But oh my word, if you want to infect brains, marketing is just the bees knees.

Indeed!

Destiny Hagest wrote:
You can either use an image you or someone else has given you permission to use, or you can do a search in Google for images without ownership or copyrights on them.

We've also got a thread here in which Paul has explained at some length his views (which are the important ones, because he's the one who gets yelled at, or worse, if we get this wrong) about when it may be appropriate to use someone else's image in a thread here on Permies when we don't have explicit permission to do so. This may help any one of us source an image, especially when we are commenting, quoting, and linking back to other people's web stuff in our threads here at Permies.

Dan Boone wrote:

Destiny Hagest wrote:Sorry, I know I'm all like - "Marketing, link building, networking, blah blah blah!"

It's annoying, and totally not permaculture-y, and I'm very sorry.

If you'll consider my advice, it would be "Never apologize for marketing." Because I don't feel that marketing per se needs any apology. It's vital, these days, to just about every economic or educational enterprise of any scale whatsoever.

My own rule of thumb is that if I feel the need to apologize for a particular bit of marketing, it's a sign that I ought to redesign that bit until it's better. The best marketing in the world is the marketing that the target audience never noticed was marketing at all.

Thank you for that, that's exactly how I feel about it. You just can never hope to be successful or spread your message without at least considering the ways in which information travels, marketing is just so vital. I'm so new to it all still, but the internet has leveled the playing field so much. I think someone else said in our other thread on DA that this site already has so much great content, if we combine that with just a little bit of SEO and some link building exercises, we have the potential to blow up even bigger here, and with any luck, drive up additional sources of revenue to fund the world domination.