Yahoo continues to make big changes to hopefully get the company back on the right track. Everyone has heard of the recent acquisition of Tumblr earlier this week, and today there was a major overhaul to the Yahoo! Owned picture sharing site Flicker. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, reported that she made the challenge to her Flicker team to ‘make Flicker awesome again’ and it appears they have done just that.
The site now prominently features full resolution photographs, eliminating or de-emphasizing text and links. They have truly reorganized the entire site to return the focus on giving users an excellent experience surrounded around viewing and sharing images. Flicker now offers every user a full terabyte of free space to host their pictures which is up to 70 times more space than any other photo hosting site available.
In addition, Flicker also announced a new android app which is available in the Google Play store. When Flicker released the iOS version of the app earlier this year they saw a 25% spike in user interaction, largely credited to the increased focus on the picture sharing.
Flicker has long been a powerful marketing tool because of how easy it is to add and edit images and share them with people through social networks. Creating and sharing product images has been a successful way to build brand awareness for many companies for several years and with this refocusing on the actual image there is plenty of room for additional marketing strategies.
Yahoo is hoping to add in additional cross platform support between Flicker and Tumblr to help increase the functionality of both sites. This could give marketers of large and small businesses additional opportunities to build some very effective campaigns for either direct marketing or link building in the future.
I’m glad to see Yahoo is continuing to make positive improvements to their overall brand and will be interested to see how these ongoing changes will be used by marketers around the world.
