Great Social Media Idea: Top 100 Photos

Guten Tag, dear readers! (Oh yes... I can sprechen the Deutsch. Most useful language EVER!)

Today I'm going to highlight an idea that I have posted a few different variations of in the past, but I always keep coming back to because it works so well as good content and - bonus! - something great to post when you don't really have anything to post. This is particularly helpful in the post-graduation doldrums that strike every college. (Speaking of which - of you missed last week's #casesmc Twitter chat about the challenges of finding things to post in the summer, you can should check it out.)

So... check out this fun gallery Arkansas Tech University posted of the Top 100 Photos from Spring 2014:

What jumped out at me most about this was the inspired choice of Flickr as the home for this collection. With its recent update, Flickr's interface is beautiful - especially for large galleries like this. As great as Facebook is in a lot of ways, the fact of the matter is that it browsing a large gallery of photos on it is drudgery. You either have to click through the each photo individually or - if you can manage to figure out how to access it - you can find the gallery page that auto-crops everything to small squares. Yuck.

Though Flickr is sort of a forgotten animal these days, it's absolutely perfect for something like this. Not being able to tag people is a drawback, sure, but the initial experience of viewing it is so much more pleasant that I'm sure it will result in a lot more people scrolling all the way to the bottom and enjoying all the great pics.

It's a good thing to keep in mind - picking the right tool for the right project. You don't always have to shoe-horn something onto Facebook, and of course Arkansas Tech still promoted it on FB - just with a link to the Flickr gallery rather than creating a FB album.

Anyway, putting together a collection like this is perfect "filler" content when things are a bit slow, because it's easy enough to do if you've got easy access to photo archives and it's something that is enduringly popular. People love good photos. Always. Full stop.

So hats off to you, Arkansas Tech!