Using Social Sharing to Increase Brand Visibility with an Open Air Photo Booth
Smiling faces captured in an open air photo booth will go on to be new Facebook profile pictures, Twitter Avatars, LinkedIn Head shots, and Instagram posts. They'll be in albums, timeline photos, and tweets - which is all great news for you if your brand is attached. Guests who have the ability to instantly share on-site are much more likely to share images than those guests who must find a gallery post-event. To get the most brand visibility for your conference, launch party, or meet-up, follow these best practices:
1. Have a Reliable Internet Connection
Social sharing is key for brand visibility, but it won't matter if your internet connection is acting like a 1996 AOL dial up. If guests have to wait even 10 minutes to share their images, the rate of sharing drops drastically. In the words of one of our favorite Youtube videos - "Ain't nobody got time for that." We all want instant gratification. In the best case scenario, you'll have a wifi connection that blocks anyone besides the photo booth from joining. You can also use mobile tethering or a dedicated hotspot to ensure reliability. In some cases, the photo booth company will build this into their social sharing rate.
2. Use a Custom Overlay with a Centered Logo
We most commonly think about a photo overlay as a watermark in the corner of an image; however, this is a huge missed opportunity for your brand visibility. Over 70 million images are shared on Instagram every day (Instagram) and these images are all cropped to square! That means that your logo in the corner will be cut off. To avoid that, design a social overlay with instagram in mind keeping your branding in the center.
3. Auto-attach a Hashtag with Twitter Shares
Many times photo booth social sharing will allow you to auto-attach a hashtag, text, or Twitter handle with your guest's uploads. For some more advanced marketers, you can take this one step further by entering a landing page URL as the default upload text. This way, when anyone converts on that landing page you can actually attribute your open air photo booth rental as a tactic in a broader lead generation strategy.
4. Use a custom branded backdrop
Your guests can choose to post to social media without your recommended hashtag or download the image from the gallery without any branded overlay, but one thing they cannot do is change the actual background of the image. Custom step-and-repeats or branded backdrops are a great way to show-case your brand or event sponsors and continue to create exposure as these photos are uploaded and shared.
