Social media has changed. First came the blog. In recent years, however, 1500 word blog posts have been largely replaced by short Facebook posts. Those have been overshadowed by 140 character tweets. Twitter has, in turn, been bypassed by Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube. We’ve moved from large blocks of text, to short bursts of texts to image-driven communication. It makes sense: 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and images are processed more quickly than text. As our society becomes more accustomed to immediate information, providing it through images and video is the natural progression.
By bringing images into your social media efforts, you can dramatically increase user engagement and as a result, ROI. For example, on Facebook, images get over 50% more likes than text updates. That’s a lot more people- who haven’t yet liked your page- seeing your content. If your images are helpful or inspirational, you’ll build engagement and outreach through your followers sharing it. On your blog, images not only break up text and replace some written content with easily scannable visual content, but can increase search engine traffic if they are properly tagged.
Ways to use images to effectively communicate:
- Use effects to make your images exciting and original. There is a wealth of sites and apps you can use to create photo collages, change colors, and add other interesting effects to your images.
- Include your message. Take your image and add some short text to introduce it or add weight to it.
- Link it up. Include links to your site or other important pages to your images.
- Make it mean something. Your image is only meaningful if it helps or inspires your target audience. Also, an image that’s evocative of something timely can be very meaningful and create engagement.
- Be a tease. Use your images to tease content and then provide a link to follow through for more information.
- Inspire action. Make your image include content prompting a call to action.
- Mix it up. Use photos, quotes, checklists, infographics, slideshares, and videos to communicate quickly to your audience.
- Know where you’re going. Decide where you want the post to take people and make sure the message of the image and any associated content takes them there through links or other information.
Remember your brand. Keeping your brand consistent in everything you do is important. Bear in mind the core values of your organization that you want to communicate in every contact with your audience and make sure your images support that. Keep your colors, fonts, and image style consistent with your website, cross-platform content, and other marketing tools.
There is a multitude of DIY tools, sites and apps that can help you integrate more imagery into your social media outreach. Even the relatively inexperienced user can make pretty impressive images with these tools. There may, however, be times that it’s best to invest in a professional designer. Just as it’s a good practice to turn to a professional designer for a responsive web site, for example, it’s wise for marketers without a lot of design experience to get some help with projects like cover images to be shared across platforms, videos that will reside long-term on your website, and infographics that provide critical information that may make or break a deal with a potential customer.
