Why using quality photos is so important for your beauty business and brand.

Why Quality Images Are Important in Your Social Media Marketing for your beauty business. 

Quality images are important. We live in a world of first impressions and short attention spans. That is why the photos you choose to use on your social media posts matter.

Let’s look at some statistics:

• Tweets with images received 150% more retweets. Buffer
• Tweets with images received 89% more favorites. Buffer
• Facebook posts with photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts. FastCompany
• And Instagram, as you know is ALL about photos.

Now, let’s put this into practical terms

 First, the images you choose represent your brand. They are part of your brand recognition and help lead to sales. They should be unique to you, so that when someone sees your photo, they know who put it there. 

 Second, your images should be relevant. That means they interest your audience, grab their attention, answer a question, educate them, or entice them to take an action. Imagine if your company sells a beauty product, but the picture on the post is of a forklift. You may have grabbed your reader’s attention for a second, but they are wondering “What the heck?!”

Third, the images you use will attract followers and increase engagement. The better quality your photos the higher impression you make with your audience. It shows you take your business seriously, and so should they. Quality images will slow the scroll and help engage your audience.

Fourth, images help your readers process information. Photos increase our ability to remember, and we all want our audience to remember our brand. When you use images you increase the chance that your audience will remember your post. 

Humans are biologically wired to process information visually. That’s science. They grab visual information quickly, in fact in about ¼ of a second, so with a human attention span of 8 seconds, photos are important.

10 tips for quality photos

We know that if we want to reach our intended audience, we need to use photos, however, if you want to grab their attention and make them buy, then you need to use good photos. 

You don’t need an expensive camera. In most cases, you can take good photos with your phone. Here are a few tips to improve the quality of your photos.

1. Clean off your camera lens. Your phone lens gets dust and fingerprints which will show up as smudges and dust specks on your photos, so start with a clean lens.
2. Make sure you get close to your subject. You can crop closer with an editing app if needed, but do NOT zoom in with your phone because you will decrease the photo quality. 
3. Avoid distracting backgrounds. When you are trying to display a product, look out for things in the background of your subject that will draw your reader’s eye away from your product.
4. Make sure your lighting is good and always the same if you're taking before and after photos. The photo should not be too dark or too bright. You can adjust some of that with editing apps, but try to get good lighting to start with because you want the photo to look natural. One tip is to try taking the photos by a well lit window or use your professional beauty light or ring light.
5. Make sure the subject is in sharp focus. If you have trouble holding your phone steady, invest in a mini tripod. With most phones you can tap on the subject to lock the focus.
6. Try different angles: eye level, below, above, etc. Move around and take several so you have choices and get the best shot.
7. Don’t over edit your photos. You can do some pretty far out things with editing apps, but unless that is your business brand, you want them to look natural.
8. Adjusting clarity improves the midtones within your photo and increases the texture and sharpness of objects. An editing app can help with this.
9. Upload the correct size photo. If you have your phone set to a minimum size photo to save storage space, you may have a low image quality on your posts. An ideal image size is 1,200 pixels wide by 675 pixels tall (a 16:9 ratio). The minimum size is 600 pixels wide by 335 pixels, although you run the risk of it looking pixelated on a desktop monitor.
10.  Interesting composition. Think about everything that is inside your frame, the foreground, the background, where the object is placed, etc. Try various options until you find the one that best tells your brand story.

MY #1 GO-TO EDITING APP

As a beauty industry professional I am pressed for time, always! I don't have time to lug around my professional DSLR camera everywhere so I only use my iphone. 

Not saying you shouldn't use a professional camera by any means BUT I know most of us are working on a tight budget and a tight timeline and we need to be able to take good photos on the fly, edit them with a click or two and post! 

My favorite go-to editing app for my photos is SnapSeed!

I only use two functions inside of the SnapSeed app and as you can see below, it makes a huge difference in my client before and after photos. I use the "brighten" feature to brighten the entire photo and reduce high contrast shadows and the "details" feature for smoothing the texture of a photo..... and in these cases, the skin!

I mean, who doesn't want smoother skin, right?

FOR BRIGHTENING

Once inside the app simply click on "tools" ----> tune image----> brightness... and slide the slider bar to brighten or darken the photo.

FOR SMOOTHING 

Once inside the app simply click on "tools" ----> details...then just slide the structure bar up or down to smooth out the noise in the entire photo.

Be careful not to go too crazy with editing and smoothing photos as this can make your photos seem fake or unrealistic to your potential clients. You want your clients to still look human but you do want your work to show up and be highlighted too! Nothing wrong with that!

Two other interesting tidbits

Research suggests that different types of product images work differently on Facebook and Instagram.

For example, images with a body part interacting with a product perform better on Facebook posts. However, images of only the product received the most comments.

On Instagram, better performing images are brighter, have a lot of white space or background space, have a single dominant color, and a low saturation with gray, faded, or pastel colors. And unlike Facebook, images with faces perform better on Instagram.

Conclusion

You don’t need to be a professional photographer to have Instagram worthy photos, but you do need to do more than point and shoot. Your photos should be the first thing you think about and not an afterthought because the impact they have with your audience can make or break your following and your business.

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-XO

Dori