In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know by now that every social media platform is in love with images. On some sites like Instagram, that’s all there is to see. So taking the perfect photo is important.

Facebook and Twitter are pushing images because they see them as more engaging for users than a piece of text. But the problem is that since everybody is being told to create images, there’s been a massive dip in quality.

These days it seems like everybody believes they’re a photographer. They’ve got a camera on their phone, and that’s all they need, right? No photography skills. Just point and click.

It’s no surprise we see so many terrible photos when we’re scrolling through social media. It’s especially hard for us when we see a business taking bad photographs. Nothing can hurt a brand quite like an unprofessional image.

Luckily, we’re here to give you some easy tips that can improve your photographs in minutes.

How do you take a photograph? Do you point at the thing you want to take a picture of then hope for the best? Or do you take your time, line up your shot and compose it.

If you want to take a good photo, you need to think about composition and one of the rules that will make your photos shine is the rule of thirds.

With the rule of thirds, your photographs can be split up into segments with four lines. By placing the main subject of your photograph so it intersects the lines, you can ensure that anybody that views your photo will have their eyes drawn there.

Our instinctive reaction when taking a photo is to put the subject in the middle of the frame or to have it take up the whole of our screen. But putting the subject to one side of the photo makes the eye focus on it more than if it was in the entire photo. It forces the photo to have a background and a foreground, which improves the photo immensely.

I’m not sure this needs explaining. If the camera you’re using makes everything look like an out-of-focus mess. Then your photos will be an out-of-focus mess!

Thankfully this isn’t much of a problem these days as most modern phones have a decent camera attached. But if you have a cheap phone (or a cheap camera) it’s almost guaranteed that your photos will look cheap too.

If you’re posting your photos to social media regularly, consider buying a point and shoot camera to use. The quality will blow your phone away and will give your images more depth instantly.

You’re just about to capture the perfect moment. Your composition looks good, you’ve got a great foreground and an even better background. Then you take your photo, the flash goes off and ruins everything.

The camera flash on phones and cameras can be harsh. Making everybody look like a ghost or washing out the colors of everything in the foreground.

It might sound simple, but turning off your flash can vastly improve your photos. Unless you’re shooting in incredibly low light, the photo you take will be close to what you see in front of you.

If it’s not necessary to use flash, then don’t. Leave the flash to the professionals.

How many times have you seen photos from your friends on social media and you’ve thought, “Why have they bothered to take a photo of THAT?” The trouble is we often think something will be interesting to others because it’s interesting to us.

If that were true, The Go! Agency wouldn’t post anything but Star Wars pictures. But we know that won’t interest our followers. Instead, we create images that we think our followers will like to see. Since we’re a marketing business, a lot of our images are based around marketing.

When you next take a photo for social media, ask yourself whether it’ll interest your followers. If not, maybe it’s best to keep it for your personal album.

These four tips seem simple, but it’s surprising how just a small change can have massive effects on your photo quality.