Social Photography May Have Traffic Potential

LOS ANGELES — Adult image marketers may have an intriguing new traffic source available to them, via the growing world of social photography.

Social media, networking and search are all the rage these days, with initiatives such as Google’s rapidly rising “+1” program and the “likes” of Facebook, among the many options that viewers have for praising a particular piece of content.

Given consumers’ propensity for photo sharing and the always-available accessibility of modern camera phones and online venues for image display, it was inevitable that more robust social tools would be added to this arena.

Enter Photorank (www.photorank.me), a new service designed to measure a photographer’s influence across a range of social media platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, Instragram, Lockerz, Picplz, Twitpic, Twitter and Yfrog; compiling a Photorank Score as a measurement of the user’s social photo-sharing activities.

According to the company, its Photorank Score ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest score. It is based on overall photo activity on various social networking sites and is heavily weighted towards activity within the past 21 days — providing its users with ample motivation to perform more frequent photo updates. Other ranking factors include the number of “likes” and other positive comments that photos receive.

Photorank parent Olapic co-founder Luis Sanz says the service is based on an algorithm the company developed to rank user-generated photos submissions.

“At Olapic.com, we have to deal with large amount of user generated photos, and we found that being able to identify the best pictures was really important to create a good user experience,” Sanz said. “We also found that the ‘reputation’ of the people uploading the pictures was the best proxy to identify them, and that’s how we started developing an algorithm to measure it.”

As for ways of improving your score — and your general success as an image marketer, the company blog offers a valuable tip: “It’s simple; take good pictures that people care about and engage with your community.”

“Uploading a large amount of pictures will lead you to increase your activity score,” the blog added. “But if they have poor quality and people just ignore them, your overall score will decrease.”

This commonsense approach to ratings also provides an insight into what it takes to profit from any media marketing endeavor — including the savvy use of adult-oriented images for social photography and search marketing — as a tool to boost traffic and revenues.