On Friday I gave you 3 suggestions for posting photos to Facebook. One suggestion was to share product photos from your website and the other two required taking photos with your smartphone and uploading them.
The problem with Facebook photo sharing is that you need to take a photo with your smartphone, post it, and comment on it at that moment. If you're too busy running a jewelry store then these suggestions are not good for you. There is a solution to make your daily photo snapping faster, and defer the commenting until later. But it's not through Facebook...
Enter Google+.
The smartphone Google+ app has a feature called Instant Upload. With this you can snap photos all day long and never worry about uploading them. Each photo is uploaded to a private album in your Google+ account without needing to tap, resize, and wait for an upload. The feature is permission based and you can turn it on or off when you want to. You can also set your phone to upload only when connected to WiFi or only when charging. If you don't care about data usage or power then you can just let the phone do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
Naturally you need a Google+ account to do this and, although this is a handy feature, I'll tell you now that not everyone will like it.
Once you take your photos they will eventually appear in your online account. You'll find them in the Google+ Photos area of your account. In fact, Google makes them very easy to get to because the Instant Upload folder is shown first when clicking the Photos icon.
I have my iPhone set to allow push notifications, and it shows the message "Google+ New photos added from Instant Upload. Share with your circles." My Android uses power too quickly so I have push notifications turned off on that device.
At the end of the work day you can leisurely go into your Google+ account and manage the photos that have been uploaded since activating the Instant Upload feature. By the way, you can turn the upload feature on and off whenever you need to. You can also delete photos from Google+ if they look bad or were accidentally uploaded.
While viewing the Instant Upload album you can click each image and either "Share" it using the green button, or click the "Add to album" button. Even if you don't organize the photos into albums, sharing a photo will also automatically categorize as "Photos from your posts." I suggest creating an album called Jewelry Store Photos, or Jewelry Store Customer Photos, and keep them organized.
You do not, and should not, post all your Instant Upload photos at the same time. Share one at a time with a long description of who's in the photo, what the jewelry item is, and any other details. You can use the Instant Upload feature for one day and have enough photos for 2 or 3 weeks of posts. Keep the photos hidden in the Instant Upload album until they are used.
If you share several photos at a time Google+ will group them in your Stream. You don't want to expend your photography efforts in a single shot, instead, release them one at a time over several days. Every time you share something to the public it appears in Google's Search. Google likes frequent new content, and this slow release of photos with long descriptions is perfect.
Odds are that you don't have a lot of people circling you in Google+. That's okay right now; this method of sharing photos is more for placement in Google SERP than anything else. The biggest difference between photos on Google+ and Facebook right now is that you can't upload photos from your phone to a Google+ Page--they only upload to your personal profile. This is a big drawback for generating interest in your store's G+ Page, but the SERP benefits are certainly valuable enough to make the effort worthwhile.
Google has ways of figuring out who you are connected to online. Each of your Google+ Shares has a chance of influencing the SERP for one of your friends or customers. Sharing photos also helps to influence the image SERPs for the same people. Your consumers probably won't notice, or perhaps they will be happy to see one of your G+ shares in their SERP.
This is just another subtle method of inbound marketing. It won't take as much time as photo sharing on Facebook, and the use is totally different, but worth the work.
One final note: If you're like me, you have several thousand photos on your phone. Be careful with the Google+ Instant Upload settings. One of them says "Upload all photos and videos" which will start a huge upload of everything on your phone. Although the photos are still uploaded to a private album, deleting all of them will take some time.
