With social media feeds getting ever more crowded, the battle for attention is constantly ramping up, and if you want to stop people scrolling on by your posts, you’ll likely now need some level of stand out visual element in order to grab them and hook them in.

But creating your own visuals is time-consuming, and not always so easy to do, and paying for access to stock libraries can be costly. The alternative, then, is that you probably end up checking out Google Images and/or free image libraries, looking for something that fits – but even then, you could end up violating copyright by posting something that seems legit, but has been shared to a free image site incorrectly.

So what do you do? What are the rules around image copyright online and how can you ensure, to the best if your capacity, that you’re playing by the rules when using visuals?

The team from Hootsuite recently published a comprehensive guide on this, in which they’ve included this helpful checklist to help you determine what’s okay, and what’s not, in image sharing.

It’s worth keeping handy as a reminder to ensure you stay in the clear. You can read Hootsuite’s full guide to image use here.

Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/can-you-use-that-image-on-social-media-checklist/573525/