Social Media is a necessary evil these days when promoting events, ideas or your group.
Here are some top tips from Click Region on taking great pictures to accompany your social media post.
- Make sure that your phone camera lens is clean. A simple quick clean with your finger often suffices.
- Make sure the subject matter is in focus
- Before you take the photo double check there is nothing obstructing the main focus of the image eg: someone’s back turned to the camera, obscuring the presenter, objects appearing to be coming out of people’s heads or in the middle of the shot
- Give your image a narrative- ask yourself why am I taking this picture, in this particular way? eg: if event attendees are looking at something on the ground try and get a shot of what they are looking at too!
- Avoid having peoples backs to the camera
- Take a variety of orientations ie: landscape and portrait.
- Give the composition some thought. The rule of thirds: divide your image into a grid of 3×3 (9 areas) and put the focal point in one of the intersections around the middle third.
- Don’t shoot into the sun
- Balance your highlights and shadow areas. For example if the presenter is standing in the shade under a tree and the group is in the sun outside the shade it is difficult to get detail in both the shadows and highlights. Pick one subject or the other.
- Look at your image once you have taken it, so if it needs tweaking you have a chance to reshoot before you get home and realise it is too late because the shot didn’t work!
- Take more than one shot/version of each image
Mel from Click Region has advised that if photos are not clear and don’t follow the above guidelines the Facebook algorithm will not favour the post and it will not show up in anyone’s feed. As all photos on Facebook automatically go on google it also means that if anyone searches that topic (i.e. your group or project) on google and the only things that come up are considered poor photos, then google will also not ‘reward’ you and hence will not come up in searches either.
