THE POWER OF THE PLATFORM: VISUAL STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL NETWORKS 121 Photographer Trey Ratcliff has nearly 5.5 million followers on Google+. He has used his visual talent to take advantage of Google+’s ability to put images center stage and build up an impressive audience. He often has 2,500 or more +1s, and hundreds of people will share his posts, all because of his skill with visual social strategy. Ratcliff’s strategy can be used by marketers to build their own brand audiences: • Try to tell a story through your images, and tag everyone involved or interested. • Follow people whose posts and images you can share to inspire others. Ratcliff says, “I believe curating my own list of people to follow is very, very important. I need constant inspiration and ideas, so I circle up peo- ple who give me ideas, make me happy, and make me think.” • Host Hangouts, and share them on YouTube. • Share your YouTube videos on Google+ to get cross-pollination between the two sites. • Tell stories by sharing visuals of behind-the-scenes activity at your com- pany. Or tell stories of customers and how your product has improved their lives. Add great captions to make the images stand on their own. • Regularly point back to your website to let customers find out more. Ratcliff says, “I think of Google+ and these tools as leaving scent trails to a bigger food source, if you accept the superorganism communica- 166 tion analogy.” Google+’s popularity with young, tech-aware people has made it the network of choice for brands eager to connect with this demographic. Chocolate manufacturer and London 2012 Olympics sponsor Cadbury wanted to expand its audience among this very group, and the company decided to use some of the unique features of Google+ to build a com- munity of the network’s users (https://plus.google.com/+CadburyUK). The company’s goals were to engage with the 18- to 25-year-old audience,