Tools for Transparency: Make Images Social with Thinglink

by

Thinglink is a new service that adds a level of social engagement to static images through tagging. Thinglink works with services like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Spotify, Vimeo, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and Twitter, allowing you to embed rich media into your images.  You can see an example below:

It’s easy to set up. All you need is an embed code and a javascript snippet. Actually tagging the image is intuitive and takes only seconds. I used Thinglink a couple of weeks ago to link to the presentations from PDF 2011, take a look:

On the back end, Thinglink offers a dashboard to help you analyze post engagement; it offers a look into your posts’ views, hovers and clicks.

You’ll also get a breakdown of specific tags for clicks. Here we see that Eben Moglen’s presentation received the most clicks of all the tags for that page:

It’s an interesting concept, and allows you to add a bit more context to a photo within the photo, adding further engagement to your content. Check it out and leave any examples you might have in the comments.