In a virtual world full of photographs of dogs dressed as people and selfies of everyone, it is nice to know that the old rules still apply sometimes.
Stunning photographs of the blue seas and white sands of the isle of Harris have been attracting attention on social media.
The images have topped the list of all destinations in Scotland to receive the most engagement on VisitScotland’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts during summer 2016.
Captured on a sunny summer day, the pictures captivated the social media world with more than 333,400 likes, shares, retweets and comments.
They were taken by photographer Mo Thomson and drew thousands of comments and many comparisons to the Caribbean.
The national tourism organisation’s social media channels provide inspirational images and information about Scotland to inspire people worldwide to visit the country every year.
Most of the images posted on VisitScotland channels are provided by visitors to and lovers of Scotland, with user-generated content of great importance to the national tourism organisation.
Malcolm Roughead, chief executive at VisitScotland said: “The way that visitors access information about Scotland has changed dramatically over the past five years and our ambition is to reach more people than ever before with inspirational and exciting information about Scotland.
“We regard our social network followers very much as a community and we enjoy engaging with both our regular contributors as much as those who communicate with us for the first time.
“We’re delighted that these stunning images have topped the list of social media engagement and we hope that many more people will share their own treasured stories and images of all the beautiful regions across Scotland with us, so we can continue inspiring visitors for many years to come.”
Overall, posts about destinations in Scotland across all VisitScotland media channels led to more than 7.3million shares, likes, retweets and comments from April – September 2016.
VisitScotland’s social media channels have some of the largest followings and engagement of any other destination marketing organisation globally.
The organisation launched its first ever global campaign – the Spirit of Scotland – in February 2016, with a large emphasis on creating a social movement to help promote the country to the world.
The #ScotSpirit social campaign has been VisitScotland’s most successful social media campaign to date with nearly 200,000 uses of the hashtag across all platforms (average 1000 per day) and more than 63 million views of the Spirit of Scotland advert and mini documentaries.