Social media giant, Facebook, has started to roll out a new feature, photo commenting. This will allow you to respond to a post with a photo rather than just with words. If you have not got this feature yet you will be doing in the coming weeks. How will you know that you have got the new feature? You will see a camera icon in the right hand side of the commenting field. You click on the icon and then upload a picture from your computer. You can also still include text as well as a photograph in your comments.

The feature is not yet available in mobile apps although the comment images are viewable on mobiles so the user experience is not compromised from a read perspective. I would think that having photo comments available to post on a smartphone is likely to be when the feature really takes off. Think about all the posts where people ask a question like “What are you doing right now?” you could type a reply but it would be so much better if you could post a picture, especially if you are doing something unusual. For example I am going to a circus this evening and it might be fun to post a pic or two in reply to somebody asking how I am today.

Of course this feature is already available within a private message on Facebook but I guess this is just another way that Facebook wants us to share more of our lives. We live in a time where our lives are being documented in an unprecedented manner. We constantly share information about ourselves that will be an anthropologists dream in the future. I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone that I have had for around 18 months, during that time I have taken of 3637 photos and I will be adding to that total this evening.

We are documenting the world in a way that has never been possible before. Our lives, emotions and experiences are laid out on social media sites like an indelible marker detailing every aspect of our lives, both the trivial and not so trivial.

How Can Photo Commenting Be Used?

Here are a couple of ways that photo comments could be used. If you are holding an event then rather than posting on your timeline and asking people if they enjoyed it you could ask people to post their photos in the comments. This would create a sort of mini gallery of the event that would be interesting for users to look at. It would also help to add context to the images. If people were just to post their photos to your timeline then when users who did not attend the event look at your page they are likely to be confused as to what is going on. If that user sees a post saying “How good was last night? Post your pics in the comments and show us!” then there is now context to why people are posting these pics.

If you are the owner of a business page then while you might want user engagement you might not necessarily want poor quality photos appearing on your timeline even if they have been posted by people who have liked your page. Keeping them in the comments will differentiate your output from that of others.

I think for news events these images are likely to be very valuable. Major news organisations will be able to take advantage of all the citizen journalists out there and when a major news story is breaking, such as the protests that are currently taking place in Turkey, then they could use this feature to help collate images in one place. Old media really struggles with the immediacy of new media. I lose track of the number of times I have told people in the last two years that I generally learn of news stories on Twitter and when I go to a mainstream news website there is no mention of it for a couple of hours. By using this system news organisations would be able to ask on their Facebook page “Where you there? Post your pictures in the comments”. This would allow the news organisation to aggregate content that they can use on their website or broadcasts while at the same time help to keep them relevant in the eyes of the masses and a resource that users will potentially go to when news events are taking place.

If you are thinking that this would be a great way to hold a competition on Facebook then think again. The basic idea of holding a competition that is based on users liking a page and posting a picture is in contravention of Facebook regulations and could lead to your page being deleted. Facebook competitions need to have two parts, one can be liking the page, the second must not involve any sort of Facebook functionality such as liking a post, posting a photo etc. This is so that in the event that a dispute breaks out between an entrant and competition provider Facebook cannot be deemed liable for any costs that may be incurred as a result of the dispute.

Photo comments on Facebook is likely to prove very popular with both users and online marketers, after all a picture is worth a thousand words.