Flickr site, The Lodges at Gettysburg

By Karen Hendricks

Welcome to “Gettysburg Social!” This column examines the latest social media trends, while highlighting Gettysburg and Adams County businesses. This article was first published in Celebrate Gettysburg magazine, Nov/Dec 2013. 

Americans love to take pictures. National Geographic estimates that we took some 80 billion photos in 2011 and projects that we’ll snap as many as 105 billion by 2015, thanks in great part to the convenience of camera phones. While more photos are uploaded to Facebook than any other form of social media, the photo site Flickr is seeing a resurgence in usage thanks to a makeover by its parent company, Yahoo!

Flickr has two main advantages: sharing of photos to a wide audience and free online storage space. Once uploaded to Flickr, users can highlight their photos via a Flickr photostream on their website, Facebook account or blog; users can also tweet the URLs of their photos to share them on Twitter.

Business benefits abound. What types of photographs could you upload to Flickr to promote your business or non-profit? The possibilities include: photos of your products, finished or in behind-the-scenes stages of development; photos that demonstrate your services; smiling employees or customers (you can even add testimonials in the photo comments); and involvement in community or volunteer events.

Creating a Flickr account is completely free, unless you’d like to upgrade to an ad-free, paid account. To log in, you will need to create a Yahoo! account, which is also free. Flickr users receive a terabyte of space—that’s about 500,000 photos according to Flickr. And professional grade cameras are certainly not required—the top three most common cameras from which photos are currently uploaded? The iPhone 5, 4S and 3.

There are a number of Adams County businesses showcasing the area’s beauty through photography on Flickr:

• The Lodges at Gettysburg – Take a virtual tour of this gorgeous property, its cottages and dining facilities.
• SegTours of Gettysburg – Enjoy sweeping battlefield vistas combined with the often-comical visuals of visitors on segways.
• The Land Conservancy of Adams County – Explore the pastoral settings of preserved Adams County properties.

Simply click on the links above to explore Flickr, or create your own personal or business account today! If you’d like to share a link to a favorite Flickr site, feel free to leave a comment below.