Facebook ads have been becoming more and more popular over the past few months. You don’t even have to take my word for it though, you can just login and take a look at your newsfeed. Sponsored posts and stories abound, and it’s only trending upwards. Even on Facebook, content is king, and that’s especially true for visual content. Ads with pictures do orders of magnitude better than those without, and now Facebook is making it even easier to attach a photo to your posts. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it will affect your social media marketing.
Facebook is adding a feature that gives advertisers instant access to millions (yes millions) of commercially licensed stock photos to use in their advertisements. The best part? They aren’t going to change the price of their ads or charge you for the photos you use. So essentially it’s a huge library of free stock photos.
“High-quality, engaging photos often increase the performance of ads, particularly in News Feed. And now, through our collaboration with Shutterstock, it will be easier for businesses to integrate beautiful photography into their Facebook ads,” Facebook said in its announcement.
This is a major move on the part of Facebook. By making it easy for people without access to graphic designers to have professional imagery on their advertisements, Facebook is really leveling the playing field. Here’s a sample of the gallery view from Facebook:
It should be noted that even though there are millions of images available, nothing replaces having unique imagery. The stock photo library will be a great resource that I’m sure every business will benefit from at one time or another, but don’t let it replace your original imagery if at all possible. The fact is that even out of a library of millions, marketers are bound to latch on to a view particularly relevant images, and you don’t want to be caught using the same stock photo as your competitor.