Flickr is a photo-sharing site that gained popularity because of its community features. You can make friends, or contacts, comment to others’ photos, and join groups. But you can also do this on social networks, like Facebook and Myspace, where you and your all friends/brand loyalists already belong. So why should you incorporate Flickr in your strategy when you can just use these other sites? I’ll tell you why…

With Flickr, you can easily share your photos with a much wider audience. When you post an image on MySpace, or Facebook, the image lives exclusively in that location. With Flickr, on the other hand, you can easily incorporate images to your blogs, social networks, or to other sites. Additionally, Flickr images rank highly in image searches. Check out The National Aquarium’s blog to see how they incorporate their visitors’ photos through a Flickr feed.

What if you want to share your private pics with a friend or a family member, like your old Pop-Pop, who doesn’t belong to any social networks? Well, normally, Pops would either have to create an account, or you’re both out of luck. However, with Flickr, you can send out guest-passes, which are email invitations that allow you to invite people who do not have a Flickr account to instantly view your private image sets. There’s no login or registration required and the guest pass doesn’t expire unless you set it to do so.

Here are 5 other rad reasons why you should check out Flickr:

1. Picture Notes & Commenting - not only can you leave comments below pictures, you can leave point things out within a picture and leave notes on them. Check it out.

1. Image editing - Flickr partnered with Picnic so you can easily crop, resize, and edit your photos without the hassle of costly image editing software.

1. Flickr-Yahoo Maps mashup - You can search keywords and locations and see the most recent and most interesting images displayed on a map.

1. It’s a great platform for spreading interesting content - Check out this photo stream promoting images from 7-11’s The Simpsons promotion. It’s received 840,567 views of 60 photos within a year.

1. It’s a perfect for creating a community where your friends can be creative. Bon Jovi created a group encouraging his fans to upload images of their hometown to his group and tag them with “bonjovilovesmyhometown.” He then used the images from the group to create this really cool mosaic poster.

For more examples of how brands are using Flickr, check out this informative blog post from Geoff Northcott.