Eye candy

Images are among the most powerful tools in social media: they are easily consumed, and offer more stimulating information than text.

And since most people are busy and increasingly tightfisted with time, mastering the image — which takes little effort to scan — has a lot of appeal.

Search Engine Land provides advice on how to apply this medium into a successful media campaign.

A few of the tips:

• Use groups of images for targeted groups to add content.
• Mark your images with a non-intrusive personal stamp, like your URL - these images are then easily copied, thus ensuring higher overall exposure.
• Use large images, preferably of the same size when presented in group, and be sure to categorize them.
• Host your images on services like Amazon’s S3 and Flickr Pro to prevent your server from being overburdened.
• Go ahead and use funny pictures, but never mix them with news/information images: Users don't appreciate this.
• Use high quality photography and high resolution design-related content (e.g., digital art, graffiti, web design, fonts).
• Informative images (charts, graphs, screen shots, how-to's, maps) that are easy to understand and comprehensive are extremely eye-grabbing and helpful.
• Look for unbelievable shots that are still believable, like action shots caught on film.
• Use breaking news photos and exclusive shots. (The Hudson plane landing is a good example of this.)

In all, images are a powerful conveyor of messages, and because they are so prime for social media consumption, it merits paying attention to detail when choosing which images to use.

Search engines, too, are recognizing their importance. Image search is the fastest-growing vertical in the search arena today, writes Michael Pekker in a blog post. (See ClickZ's tutorial on how to optimize images on your website or blog to get picked up by the search spiders.)

Three of the top search engines that offer image search portals — Google, Yahoo, and MSN — integrate images into some of their contextual search results.