Social Media Marketing can be a daunting task when you are doing it on your own. Everybody knows that we need to create posts that will grab the users’ attention while they swipe through their feed. Something that will make them stop in their tracks. There is one important practice that helps in achieving captivating and relevant imagery

Statistically, users will linger longer on a post if the imagery caught their attention in the first place. Once their attention has been grabbed, convey your short and sweet message with your text content.

Getting a perfect balance of captivating and relevant imagery is quite a task in itself, but not an impossible thing to achieve. Obviously, images created by you or photographed by you would be first prize, but let’s face the facts: We are not all Photographers or Graphic Designers. So, sourcing royalty free and high-quality images should be priority number one.

I have compiled a short list of Free Stock Photography websites that will surely give you all the ammunition you will need to source the best relevant images for your Social Media Marketing posts:

https://unsplash.com/

This website is one of my favourite resources for stock photography. Every image is high quality, taken by really talented photographers. The images on this site all work well for “eye-candy” material and lifestyle images. The easy and efficient filtering system and the photographers’ great use of tags, makes it easy for you to find the relevant images that you are looking for. PLUS, they have a HUGE database.

http://stokpic.com/

Much like Unsplash, Stokpic has a great selection of high-res and quality images. What I like about this site is that it brings you images from photographers with a slightly different perspective to those from Unsplash. The category system on this site is wonderful actually! You can go with the traditional method of searching using the relevant keywords, or, you can go into one of the popular main categories, like Landscapes, Lifestyle and Black & White. The database is not as large as Unsplash, but that has never been a problem for me.

https://pixabay.com/

This site is on a completely different level to the two aforementioned sites. As far as stock photography goes, this site is the best place to source Vector Graphics and Illustrations. If you want to take your DIY Social Media Marketing to the next level, you can learn a few Photoshop or Canva (free) skills and create some completely unique graphics for your marketing efforts. Pixabay can be your one-stop-shop for anything graphics related.

https://freerangestock.com/

Just like Pixabay, Freerange is also choc-a-block full of Vector Graphics and Illustrations relevant to various different niches – a lot of them being “business” and “corporate” orientated themes.

There are a lot more, free stock photography websites that are out there in the deep dark web, you just need to look around. The four mentioned above are my favourites and I have never gone wrong with them.

REMEMBER: When searching for images for commercial reuse (marketing), you need to be 100% sure that they have been labelled for commercial reuse and do not have a copywrite attached to them. That is why stock photography websites are your safest option when sourcing “safe” and quality images.

Now that you have some Tips and Tools, get your creative juices flowing and captivate your audience!