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>> Please stand by for realtime captions. >> SCORE webinar pictures speak louder than words. I am a content manager. I will be moderating today's session. Our presenter today is Brian Kaplan a national speaker for the grow with Google program and an award winning marketing specialist. Before turning it over to Brian I would like to mention a few housekeeping items. Across the top of your screen you will see tabs for event help, SCORE resources, and the twitter feed. On the lower left side you can count access close captioning access the slide deck and submit your questions and the ask a question box. We will answer questions after the presentation. 11 the webinar will last one hour and we are recording the webinar and we will send a link to the recording and presentation slides in an email later today. Closed captioning is also available and the live transcript can be accessed by going to and entering the event code 394-2656. We would now like to begin today's webinar pictures speak louder than words, visual content strategies for small businesses. Brian I would like to welcome you and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me and thank you to SCORE. I really appreciate the opportunity. Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar. Today we are talking about how pictures speak louder than words. I want you to remember the written word is very important for content but also when we are talking about content marketing and the overall marketing program we talk about visuals. You can see right here show me, don't tell me. By the end of the webinar you will realize how important it is. Thank you so much for introducing me. To tell you a little bit more about myself I am a speaker for grow with Google. I travel around the country and teach small business owners and nonprofits how to get found on Google. I'm the CEO of Bryan capital marketing. One of my newest of ventures is I am the host of the bitter better biz on YouTube. I have realized a lot of business owners around the country, does not matter if you are Midwest, West Coast, East Coast, South you have the same questions. I created the channel to provide video content in order to help you really grow your small business. The thing I want to point out the most here is for more resources I actually created an e-book that is an accompaniment to the webinar. You can go to rain /visuals. Let's get started. Congratulations you have one . I made the slide because as a kid and even today Mona my favorite movies remains Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. I'm talking about the Gene Wilder one. The original classic. I used to watch that and envision myself walking through the room filled with candy and everything is edible. I am sure that some of you also saw that movie and thought I would love to be there. Let me ask you a question. If I told you you won there are two ways I could tell you. One way I could write to you. Only five lucky winners will find the five golden tickets hidden in Wonka bars that have been shipped around the world. As you dive into your Wonka bar you are blinded by the bright light reflected off the 24 a gold wrapper. You wave the shiny piece of gold in the air. There is no mistake you have won. So we read that and get a little bit excited. It's like reading a book. You start coming up with visions in your head. How about if I showed you this instead. Let me ask you and I am going to put up a poll here which one gives you the one and fuzzies. Reading it or seen the beautiful golden ticket. I will ask you to respond so I can share the results with everyone. Is it the text description that will work for you or the actual ticket. You should see a survey bar pop up. I love that some of you filled out where is my chocolate. We have some pranksters in here. So let me send the results to you guys. I will give you one more second. Right here what we have just done is we have actually done an empirical scientific study. My hypothesis was that the actual golden ticket would win. Let me send you the results. You should be seeing the results right now. 85% of you , over 85% of you the actual golden ticket was what actually spoke to you. Seeing the golden ticket greetings to you the lucky finder of this golden ticket from Mr. Willy Wonka. That right there communicated to you that you have won. That is what we are talking about today. The power of visuals. Let me tell you what we are going to do. First off we will talk about why visual content matters. Then we will talk about how to make great images. We will look at some online tools. I will share some that I have learned over the years and used over years and seen small businesses win with their visuals. I will give you examples of how to drive engagement on different marketing channels around the web. So why does visual content matter? When we are talking about visual content he saw the Willy Wonka example. I could give you a couple paragraphs but what spoke to you very quickly ? The idea of the ticket and seeing the visual ticket. You can picture yourself holding that ticket and opening up the chocolate bar and waving it around in the air because tomorrow you are going to the factory. For us to understand how visual content works with we still have to understand the background of it all. I'm a big believer in getting to the core. What I did was I found this animation. I wanted to add it in for you so you can see how it works. Take a look at this animation. So what happens is light interest the ice through the cornea and passes through the people. We see light on the outside. Light helps us to make sense of the images. The amount of light passing through is regulated by the iris or the colored part of your eye. The iris determines if you have blue or green or brown or hazel eyes so on and so forth. So light is passing through the iris. The light then hits the lands and reaches the retina. The light is reflected through the lands and hitting the retina which is in the back of the eye. That is the light-sensitive nerve layer that lines the back of the eye. You can see the light hitting that I. That is where the image appears. The image appears inverted. Images actually appear upside down. What happens is the optic nerve carries the signal of light dark and the colors to the area of the brain that is called the visual cortex. The visual cortex assembles the signals as you can see here into images. That is what creates vision. A lot of the images we are processing are dictated by the amount of light we are seeing. It's really important to understand this as we go through. Part of the reason is because of rapidfire processing. In the blink of an eye you are taking 300 to 400 milliseconds. So I will ask you to blink your eye. Very quick . It still takes 300 to 400 milliseconds in order for you to blink your eye. The human mind can process an image in 13 milliseconds. If we did really quick math that means that you could process nearly 30 images in the blink of an eye. How many words can you read in the blink of an eye. Not many. We can either process several images or depend on words. That is why visuals matter so much to in addition looking at research around the web and different research studies that have been conducted it has been found that 650% higher engagement imposts that contain images over posts with only text. Posts that have images in them nearly 6.5 times as much engagement as post that only have text. I was saying before we started the webinar that I am from Boston. Love them or hate them the patriots just won the Super Bowl. I could put up a post when the patriots won the Super Bowl saying that they are world champs that is just text. Maybe I will get a couple likes. Or I could take a photo of Tom Brady hoisting nonparty trophy over his head with all of that confetti coming down from the rafters and post that. I'm willing to bet all of the money that I have that I would get more likes and comments and shares on that image. That is what we are seeing here. 87% of all engagements on Facebook alone came from posts with images. What we are talking about is this idea that nearly 9 out of 10 engagements on Facebook come from a post with just images. They will have text but the image is what's dictating the engagement. People are seeing the image and processing it very fast and making a quick response whether they are liking or commenting or sharing. The visuals are inducing that response. This one is a little bit more convoluted so we will walk through it. Here is the deal. Let's actually use the example that I just showed you of house site and vision works. I could have written that out which I did on the left-hand side of the slide and told you have a light comes in and it is reflected onto the retina and the visual cortex processes the light and darkness and images and translates the visuals to the brain where we have the vision. I could tell you about that but only 10% of written content that you read today will be retained three days later. In three days you will only retain 10%. If I showed you a visual like I did up here and he saw this animation with the light coming through how it is working and how it is hitting the back of the eye so on and so forth 65% of that visual content will be recalled within three days. A visual is going to help you recall part of the reason, the psychology behind it, the same place where we process visuals in our brain we process emotions. So we can tie emotions and visuals together. Emotion and visual also helps to sustain long-term memory. We are seeing more visuals are retained in three days. That is great. We see that visuals are important. How do we make a great visual. What types of visuals are there. Let's look at the types of visuals. There's several different types of visual content. Today because of time we are going to focus on just three of them but I will go through the list. We have GIFs . There is a constant battle on how you pronounce it. The correct way to pronounce it is like the peanut butter. Then we have photos that you take on your phone and so on and so forth. This presentation is an example of a slideshow. I built it in Google slides. Infographics. They are very powerful. They are some of the most shared content on the web. They are also more involved. You have charts and graphs and images and you are showing your learnings and statistics. That also takes a lot of time because he had to do the research and put everything together. It is a much more involved process but if you can create a good infographics you can create some shareable content. Interactive graphics where you can click on buttons and see the chart changing and so on and so forth. Motion graphics which can be animated GIFs but could also be people posting up videos that show a stationary image with one thing moving through it. I like to think of the cityscape with a river moving through. The motion is what gets us. You will see how it works in just a few minutes. Videos are very powerful. According to Cisco by the end of this year over 80% of all Internet traffic will be video. Notice that we are recording this webinar. People will wash this webinar again. Finally e-books. On my website we have an e-book. To use images. It is visual content. Now here are some best practices for you. When we are talking about photos and images these are specifically photos and images but they can also kind of layover into video as well. Think about back to that slide we are processing light. This is why we have the scientific background. Images that are light received my likes and chairs and dark images. It all depends on your brand and how you want to depict it. On the light side we are seeing that it is nice and very uncomfortable and it is like a country kind of kitchen with the pastels and everything but your eyes probably shot to that image because there is so much coming out your. Or maybe we want and more industrial theme. That can work to certain brands but the image that I am most likely going to share is going to be on the left because I processed it faster. My images received my likes and shares than dark images. Look at this one. When we are looking at images on the left your eyes probably shot to that because of the colors. There's different levels of light that are coming at us. We have the reflection of the lights. You see the blues and that kind of copper color. Images with multiple colors attract more attention. The one on the right-hand side if we are classy and elegant then maybe we are showing that but it also feels like walking into a doctor's office and it is very sterile. The colors on the left are grabbing our attention they really are asking engage with us. Images with less than 10% background perform better as visual posts. I am talking about visual posts. These are post that you are putting up on Facebook and Instagram and twitter. On the left-hand side the reason being think about it. There is so much going on but also there's more . Our minds are trying to figure on what is going on outside of the frame. We see the blueberries and the cappuccino what else is on his table. Now it's got me intrigues. As a result this is what I want to look at. I saw the question pop up that what I am getting to is the image on the right would be a product photo so you would have a professional photographer you would set up a light box you might showcase that on the website. That is where it makes sense when you are trying to sell something you can use those in moderation but with science and research have shown us is that images that do not have all that background behind them look like real homegrown images. Things that you have taken. They inject some personality and humanity into it. On the right-hand side it is contrived. Hollywood, selling the dream. On the left-hand side it is reality. That's why we are seeing visuals with less than 10% background perform better. So we talked about images now let's talk about video. On video we have the ability to share a message in a matter of seconds that somebody would otherwise take minutes to read. The first thing we want to think about with the video and I can tell you this from experience that space matters. So in the top video this gentleman is trying to sell a system. He wants to get you into an educational system where he is going to for a small investment help you to make more money. Let's say you can make 1000 or $5000. Look at the space behind him. It is not really conveying credibility. We have a filing cabinet and books and a beanbag so already my mind is more on the stuff behind him. You have to think visually. You have to clear your space. In this case what I would recommend for this gentleman is to invest in a green screen. You can grab a green screen at most big box stores. You can get it on Amazon go to a folio website and they sell packages. They are about $100-$150. I know that is a hefty investment for some but well worth it if you are going to get into video. With the green screen I can change my background. The gentleman on the top would probably have a more effective message and I would listen to him more and even consider purchasing his program if he was in a green screen with a professional background. The gentleman on the right is selling stock trading. The visuals speak for themselves. He has a picture of Wall Street up on the wall. He has a pile of money so he just went to his bank and withdrew a bunch of money. It is conveying a message. He is thinking about it. He is showing his branding here that you are going to buy into my system and you are going to make money. So think about your space when we are doing videos. Not just space, lighting. You want to use natural lighting if he can. You should be facing the window. You should not have a light source behind you. If you have a light source behind you you look like an informant on America's most wanted. People will focus on the shadows. We want to avoid shadows. You want to face the camera and make sure you are in the light and that it is behind the camera or to the sides of the camera. When we are thinking about light for videos I can tell you from experience what you want to consider is LED lighting. You might be able to purchase a studio package of lighting. We used Amazon. When you get that lighting if you use the real bolts they can get very hot. You can overheat really quickly and start sweating in front of the camera. Your makeup runs if you do make up all of those things. LED lighting does not emit a lot of heat but it is well worth it. Notice the thumbnail down at the bottom. We just sat outside. It was a nice day we had good mining. So just think about your lighting. I will give you a story here. I tried to find this video for you guys. So they were doing what you are supposed to do. This was a video testimonial from a camera phone but the woman was standing there and she was in her house next to her boiler and there was no light. We will talk about that and a second but with the lighting alone to look like an informant rather than a customer. I focus more on the shadows and started thinking about the low quality of the video than focusing on the message of how much you love this company and how much they saved her after she ran out of heating oil in a snowstorm. You really want to consider your lighting. People will be looking at those details and making an impression of your business. Then we have sound. Sound plays into it. One thing you have to be aware of is background noise. Thinking back to that heating oil video the boiler was running. She is fighting over the boiler to try to get the sound but the camera is picking up that sound because they did not have a microphone. There are tons of different microphones. You can get them for as cheap as $15. A silver microphone that you see here if you have an iPhone this is a boom mic. You can plug it into the bottom of the iPhone. I have taken videos of myself in front of a highway and that microphone is so powerful that you could not hear the highway traffic me. It still made for a great video. The other thing that you want to do is consider how you speak and how you carry yourself. Let's say that I was mumbling and saying we are going to talk about visuals today and I am really glad you came. I think your questions will be answered. It is not confident and it is not clear. Would you think of me as a credible source? I am speaking confidently because I know this from experience. That is what I want to impart on you. Think about speaking confidently and clearly. The other thing, speak slowly. Even when you think you are speaking slowly you can go slower. I learned this in a past life as a salesperson. I used to call and leave voicemails. A woman called me back and said you had a great voicemail but I could not figure out your phone number. You said it too fast. I had to listen to the voicemail five times to write down the numbers. Consider doing it slower. That stuck with me because people are going to pick up at their own speed. You want to be sure you are speaking confidently, clearly, and slowly so people can understand. So I have shown you why visuals matter based on research. I have shown you some best practices for images and videos. Now what we are going to talk about and I will share this treasure trove of tools that you can consider. You can get these slides . You can also download the science. First off we have stock photos. They are very cool in that other people have taken these photos and they have made them available for you and they have made them available for you in a commercial purpose not just a personal purpose. There is a big difference here. I'm going to tell you a story of why you should not use Google images to grab your photos. I'm sure some of you have done this and when I first started I did not know any better and I used to get Google images. In essence, someone, one of my friends a colleague of the industry had some images that were put up from Google images on his website what happened was nobody really looked into them to see if you could use them for commercial purposes. He gets a letter in the mail two months later saying he used my clients images on the site and he did not give full attribution so we are suing you. My friend was sued for $8000 for using two images that he grabbed from Google images. He had to hire a lawyer. He had to go through months of stress because it was just that feeling that he had. He confided in me that he felt helpless and hopeless. He was finally able to get them down to $4000. Just for using two images on his site. That is why you do not want to use Google images. As much as I speak for Google and everything that has to do with getting businesses online Google images is there to give you inspiration. It is not there to provide you with content that you should use for your own commercial purposes. Stock photos on the other hand here are three sites you can use that are 100% royalty free and you can use them for commercial purposes. This one is a great site that I use all the time. They are on your screen. These three are free sites. You can go on when you go to the sites you type in the keyword that you are looking for. It could be business or for the restaurant and it will show you all of the images. They are beautiful images that are tank with those keywords. When you are using stock photos use them in moderation. Everything in moderation just because you get good engagement on something does not mean they want to keep using it again. That's for the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Make sure that you are using stock photos and I will show you why your using stock photos. You go and download images now you can put text on them and add effects and your logo to them. These are three image editors. Number one is it is called "freemium" which means it's free to a point and then you have to pay. All of these ones have a free model. They also provide you with templates. Take a look at the bottom where you see my face. Those are different templates. I could have a YouTube thumbnail and a square Instagram post. I could have a quote that is shaped in a square. One that I like a lot is Adobe sparked. It is free. What happened when I created that account I told Adobe what my brand colors were. When we are talking about visuals and branding consistency is key. So I have that blue color in my brand. I have white and black. Those are really my colors. Now every image that I create defaults to those colors. I can always change them but for consistency sake I want to be sure that I have the blue in there so it is synonymous with my brand. So these are three great tools you can use once you have the images whether you take a photo on your phone or use stock photos you can edit them and really make them shine. Take a look at this. So I could have a still frame for my YouTube channel or I could create GIFs. That induces clicks and engagement. The cool thing about GIFs is they can be used on social media in your blog and an email. I get the question of the time had a wiper video in my email campaigns. Use GIFs. They allow you to actually take part of a YouTube video. In this case right here on they have a GIF maker. I can choose a section of the video that I want to use and actually have it autoplay so that when people open their inbox they can see me moving. Here is why GIFs work . It notices movement. It tells us what are we looking at. It is a marketing piece but it automatically gets our attention. By using GIFs you will induce engagement. Definitely check out . Then we have online tools for videos. Stock videos. I see some of you asking for sources. We will be sending this out. You will actually have the slides. You can also go to and you will be able to download the slides and the e-book. So stock videos. I apologize it auto corrected on me and I did not catch it. It is videos. video blocks is a paid subscription. It is over $100 for the year but it has a lot of different videos. They are always adding new content. These are two other sites that allow you to download free stock footage. With those free sites you are going to have a limited selection because they are free videos. Video blocks on the other hand you are paying for the subscription. They are also showing you free videos that might be exactly what you are looking for but you would have to pay extra. All four of these sites are very good for getting stock videos that you can use for commercial purposes. Then we've got video editors. Once you have the video how will you edit and put it together so there are two desktop options that I like. One is called Camtasia . You can just go to Google and you will be brought to it. If you have an Apple computer you have iMovie which is free with Apple. It is very powerful. It's a great tool. On mobile you have a few different options. You can download Adobe sparked. That is used for images and video they put it together and splice it together and create a movie. You can download a mobile app and also splice you can download as a mobile app. All three of those are mobile apps. You can go to Google market and get them. Let's check in. We have looked at why visuals are important. We have looked at us practices and tips. We went over a bunch of tools. A lot of those are free you can use them to source your images and edit them. Let's talk about how to drive engagement. Let's pretend you have gone through the process and created the images. Now let's figure out how to drive engagement with those visuals. One of the first big ones is Facebook. Facebook revamped its whole platform to make it very visual driven. You can see there are different types of elements that you can use. Posts or stories. In this case I posted a Harvard business review and should you the image of the school of fish going against one fish. One of my favorite bands the red hot chili peppers. Looking at the images of the brand name and you see a picture of the pyramids. Right away you know that the red hot chili peppers are going to be at the pyramids. Right below live at the pyramids. It just happened last week. That picture is telling me a lot about where they are and what they are doing. It is pretty cool that they are playing at the pyramids. On the right-hand side I do not have to say anything. This is video on Facebook. This is for Busch Gardens. If you are a thrillseeker or you love roller coasters right there that is getting attention. It is getting comments and shares. Sharing any type of visual on Facebook as we said nearly 9 out of 10 engagements on Facebook are going to have visuals in them. Videos will get more engagement than a static image. You will want to use both video and images in your posts. Then we have Instagram. Instagram is owned by Facebook. It is all visually driven. Every post you create on Instagram is either an image, or a video. On the left you can see a post. This was opposed of me presenting in Connecticut for a grow with Google to her. I posted it up and people saw and liked it and commented so forth. In the middle you have stories. We don't get into social media and how to use social media today. I'm sure there are plenty of webinars for that. Part of Instagram is stories. People will click through stories and see what their friends and people who they follow and businesses are doing. So I shared an image with me and my colleagues who is another speaker. I shared a picture of that and got some love. Another thing I did was used Instagram actually took a picture of my screen on my YouTube channel and shared a stat. 500 million hours of video watched on YouTube every single day. Half 1 billion hours of video is watched on YouTube every single day. That got a lot of likes. On the right I use video. This is called a talking head video. I'm sharing some insight and knowledge something that I have learned. I get likes and shares. It helps to get more engagement on Instagram which is the name of the game. Then we've got twitter. So you have posts and you have video. This is from Coca-Cola but the one thing I want to point out here it is a beautiful artistic image but notice the contrast. What stands out right away. The bright white text. Your potential is endless. It's a motivational post but it stands out. It definitely hits you and makes you want to look at it. That got likes and shares and all that good stuff. On the right-hand side you see like a little three-year-old boy or two-year-old boy that is climbing on a rock wall. I love with the person wrote. I was seven when I learned to wave bye-bye. This got over 50,000 likes. Your videos may not ever go viral . That is just what it is. The idea of viral posts is something that we all go for in marketing but it might never come. In this case it's just a great post and hit the jackpot. You can see how the video really plays and when you upload a video natively, meaning that you upload the video to Facebook or to twitter it automatically plays. That is very powerful. Speaking of LinkedIn here we go. We have posts on the left. These posts resonated with me. Right away you are looking at that image. You know that it is about robots and AI which is very hot now days. I see the picture of robots. What is it about. Designed by Apple built by robots. International women's day. I loved this picture. It was never addressed, it's a Cape. I will say on LinkedIn try to keep it more business appropriate. Do not use those motivational inspirational quotes with the kitty hanging on the clothesline saying hang in there. Those only go so far and if you use them all the time then you are just adding noise and not really contributing to the conversation. On the right-hand side I love this. A soldier took a video from your phone as they were basically in the field. It even says experience in the service may very but they are making you better each time. Happy Friday keep pushing them have a great weekend. It's got a lot of likes and views. When you upload the video when you are creating the post it will autoplay in the newsfeed. That moving picture will catch people's attention. Finally email marketing. If any of you are using email marketing here is a dissection of an email that we sent out. We have the image. It has my YouTube channel branding on their. We have a hero image it's a big image that shows up in the body of the email. What we did here it is the thumbnail podcast we talked about managing negative reviews on Google. We have a you little you to play button as well. People know that if they click on that what they will be brought to you to. We have a button which is also considered an image. People click on it and finally social icons. People know what to do with them. You want to include those on your website and also in email marketing so that people can connect with you in multiple places. The more places that you are connected with their customers the more impressions your business is getting. The more times you have the more opportunities you have to show visuals and get engagement and turn them into customers. So I am right on time. I want to open it up and I have been seeing questions coming. I'm glad we have a very interactive audience. Let me just point out before we start of the questions you can get flights and resources by going to . Notice how I made it an animated visual so that you are going to retain it. Let's do it. Thank you so much. We are getting some great questions. We will now start the question-and-answer portion of the call. While we do our best to address as many questions as possible we typically have more questions than time allows. If we do not get a chance to address your question please connect with a mentor after the webinar . The first question is from Roger. He is wondering could you share which tool you used to get the graphics in your presentation. I want to add movement. It is . A lot of what I did is I would create a GIF. Thoughts on using Memes especially in advocacy campaigns. They are effective but you have to be careful because they can be perceived in the wrong context. It can definitely play into it because as a little bit of levity or humor and especially with advocacy. You are trying to get people's attention that you are also trying to elicit emotion and I think it is a great way to do it. Next we have from Pam. When you are including a photo with the Facebook page -- Facebook post is the name of the photo the way that you you have titled your photo is that important for the reach of the post That is a great question. What we are talking about is when you take a photo on your phone usually when you download it to the computer it is saved as ING something. It is saved as a generic image file. A best practice for search engine optimization in general is to rename your photo files before you upload them. So yes it can increase your reach. It may not increase it with respect to Facebook but more so when you upload a photo to Facebook order twitter it does get indexed. By having certain keywords in your file name for your photo it actually increases the chance that your photo will show up and people are searching for certain keywords. Yes there is a benefit to that. How long is best for each video on Facebook and Instagram? Instagram allows up to 60 seconds. You are playing on the idea that people are looking at it quickly and moving onto the next thing. With Facebook it is the same kind of thing. Let's say that I actually went and I recorded this video on Facebook. People might be interested and may watch the whole entire 45 or 50 minute presentation. It all depends on your audience. I will bring YouTube to the mix. I used to think that on YouTube you should be doing quick 92nd videos. The sweet spot on YouTube is about 5 to 7 minutes. You want them to come in and be intrigued into what you are saying and then watch the video and really consume the information. We have several people that are interested in this. Project asked where can we get that drawing style that you are using right now. It is a tool to called dutifully -- these are huge. I created this one in a couple minutes. You can tell the whole story and this is great at capturing attention. It is also great at retention. Great. Let's see. What are some free sites for stock videos? Let me go back to that. When we are talking about stock videos we have a few. Notice that it auto corrected on me. It is videos. the only one on here that is paid is video blocks. I think that is an annual subscription it is about $125 or so. I will leave this up so people can take it down. Paul is asking what if Google images are used but they are resized and scaled and skewed. Can anybody's search and still find that they are using the Google image. Is there a code embedded in the photos. It is not a code that is embedded but they can find it. There is a reverse image search. You can go and download any photo that you want. Or you can actually copy the image location. So if you right-click on an image that you see online you can do a reverse image search. If you have ever seen the show catfish on MTV this is what they do. They take an image and run it through the reverse image search Google will show you all of the sites that that image shows up on. My colleague that was sued what happened was to give you the longer version of the story the graphic designer created thousands of images and flooded Google images. These are little graphics that might say marketing on a road sign so people would use it because it says the word marketing. What the graphic designer did was teamed up with a lawyer in California and they would use the reverse image search and find websites of people who they thought had money and they would go after them for using the image. So those images if you are resizing them or scaling them or whatever they can still be tracked. Christie is asking if I take a photo that has people in it do I need to get permission from everybody in the photo or video before I post on social media A best practice would say yes. Obviously if you talk to a lawyer they would say let me draft up the contract for you. Most of the time business owners are not doing that . In my experience when I have taken photos and posted them up I've just told people I will be posting this up. I set the expectation for them. If somebody has an issue they will usually be voicing it. I have not heard of anybody being sued but it all comes down to your audience. If they are customers and you know them than most likely you are fine. If I'm teaching a class I will say I'm going to post this on Instagram if anybody has a question let me know. Yolanda is asking is there a light box and green screen system that you would recommend. There is no system. What I did is I used Amazon and had it shipped to me. I went by reviews. It is like putting a tent together. You get some poles and put it up and you have some clips in the lighting system. Look for LED lights that have good reviews. Right away you will see if they have 2 1/2 or three stars or four and five stars. I used Amazon selfishly so that I could return it very easily if it did not work or it was poor quality. Next we have a question from Kristi. Is there a different approach when you are marketing and online business versus a brick-and-mortar business? There is a lot that goes into that. That is a loaded question. Some of the things that you would do because you are online it is more seamless for you. Having an online business it is easy for people to click over. No matter what business type it is whether it is brick-and-mortar or a physical location or online business using physicals will help you but your call to action will make the difference. I can post up a visual and say learn more here or by now here and it links to right where they have to go buy something. So there is a lot that goes into it but despite that the visuals and the called action will be the main things that drive the conversions. What are the ideal photos for restaurants on Instagram? I have gone through my menu. Any new ideas of creative photos that I can introduce. Add people into it. That is where because you are posting it up maybe you give them a free dessert or something and you actually have them take the photo with it or even using the video. Photos are great but you can also do video. It can be a quick testimonial. Somebody saying this dish is amazing. You can have quick critical reviews and critiques. Whenever you insert a person into the photo it humanizes the products and it is proof. You can take a photo of your dish on the table but how will you know if somebody likes it . That gives proof so consider adding customers in there. Have your staff serving the dishes. Show before and after. Show the raw ingredients that go into it. Take a video of how the chef is putting it together. People want to know how it is made. Show the raw ingredients when they are first sourced and taken off the truck. There's a lot of different things you can tell the story from whether it is farm to table or truck to table you can show the whole journey of the food and how it gets into the customers belly. We have a couple questions on green screens. Naomi is asking when using a green screen how do you get the background picture that you want into the video. That is a great question. It gets more into editing it is a really easy way to cancel out the green screen you can use of video in the background that's where you will learn more about video editing. That's what I always say is when in doubt Google it out. You will look at insert image green screen background so you go to Google and the search it. It also depends on the program you are using but the way the technology works if you're using a green screen do not wear anything green because it's supposed to be one solid color behind you that you can cut out and replace with another image so do not wear anything green. Always wear a contrasting color. Greg is asking I noticed all of your videos are shot in portrait format. Is there a reason they are not horizontal? Those were shot in portrait format because I was taking the clips from my phone. That owns the frame to the left and right so all of the social mediums are basically making accommodations for that. >>'s Eve says I am an inch and engineering . He does not have the skills for the visual content and is on a limited budget. I suggest using these stock photos. Going to the sites that I mentioned I will police appear in a second. If you do not have an artistic eye the first step is admitting that you do not have the artistic eye. Use stock photos and source other people's work. Circle and find images that have to do with your business or have to do with your customer base. Then you can use tools like Canva. It has templates for you. They already have suggested posts that you can use as well. You just want to make sure that when you are creating these images you may not have an artistic eye but as an engineer you understand consistency. Make sure that you are consistent with the brand and the messaging. Robert is asking is there a storyboard outline tool available for a video. There are. You will go to Google and type storyboard outline tool. I have not used one. Usually I use pen and paper. There are definitely storyboarding tools. I'm not sure if there are free tools but I am sure that there are paid tools. Christina is asking how frequently should we be posting to Instagram. You want to be posting every day if he can. What you are trying to do is you are trying to build up your followers. Instagram is visual. People are going through the feed and seeing things or searching for different hashtags. The Instagram strategy has to do with posting say one a lot of content but you also want to be sure that you are using the right hashtags to reach your audience. Such as putting up a post might not be found. So putting one up with hashtags that will definitely get some more love and help you get more followers as well. Bill is asking do GIFs work on mail chimp email templates. Yes they do. It does not matter what the program is it works in emails. That is how you are going to get motion into the emails. Share asks any suggestions for line art. >> Off the top of my head no. I'm sorry I do not have any suggestions for that. Joanne has a similar type of question. Questions or suggestions of museum art that can be used for free. That would be the same thing using those sites like that I showed you you may get museum art but what you are facing is that the museum does not have a copyright. It's the same thing that when you go to a resort they have a copyright for their visuals. You want to know that it is okay to do those images. You want to be sure that you do not end up getting a letter like my friend did. It looks like we can only take one more question. Do you recommend avatars for profile photos People have been using them creating the bit Margie avatars it depends on the channel that you are using. If that will be part of your market of your brand then yes. If you are on LinkedIn that should not be a profile photo but if it is Facebook or those other ones you can definitely use an avatar photo as long as it plays consistently with your brand. Great. Those are all of the questions we have time for today. If we did not have a chance to address your question we encourage you to connect with a local SCORE mentor. If you are interested in becoming a SCORE mentor or volunteer you can get information or apply on our website. As a reminder link to the recording of the session and the presentation slide deck will be emailed later today. On behalf of of SCORE I would like to thank you for attending and give a big thank you to Bryan Caplan for presenting today. Thank you everyone and have a great day. >> [event concluded] ................
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