As images have become increasingly important, especially on social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, marketers have been looking for new methods to leverage their visual content. One of the newer, image-related technologies involves embedding links, audio, maps, and video within images; marketers and content producers are hoping that these data-enhanced images will result in increased interest, engagement, click-throughs, and sales.
To illustrate how wineries might make use of this technology, we used a tool called ThingLink to tag two photos, one of a wine bottle and one of a winery tasting room. ThingLink was chosen because it’s easy to use and it’s free for almost all users (Taggstar appears to provide a very similar service). The first example provides information, in the form of text and links, associated with a particular wine. Typical types of wine-related embedded content include recipes, ratings and awards, vineyard and region information, technical details, a video of the winemaker describing the wine, and purchasing information.
The second example is a winery tasting room. The options for winery or tasting room-related embedded content are almost limitless: historical information, amenities, construction materials, people, products, humorous anecdotes, trivia, location, reviews, hours, videos, etc.
Images with embedded content are particularly effective when shared via social media. With ThingLink, photos shared via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are interactive, but other platforms currently require the user to click a link to return to the original webpage to experience the interactive features.
Excessive tagging of photos on a website may cause hunt-and-click fatigue, but the judicious use of tagging on a winery’s website, and especially on social media platforms such Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, has the potential to significantly increase user interest in, and engagement with, a winery’s digital content. Instead of just showing potential customers a beautiful winery or label photo, consider using your eye-catching images as a gateway to additional, interesting information about your winery and its products.