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If you’re working to build up your social media presence, you know that images are essential to boosting your online engagement. In fact, content with images gets almost twice as many views. If you’re not sharing images your audience loves, you’re missing out on serious engagement.
You need visual content, but figuring how to get it can be a challenge.
- Which images are best for your business?
- How can you find or create them?
- How can your images stand out among the avalanche of others on social media when Facebook alone sees more than 300 million images shared every single day?
In this post, you’ll get three great tips on how to up your social game so you can get more clicks, likes and follows. You’ll learn the elements of shareable images, what works on each platform, and design tips to create engaging images for social media....
A powerful picture is an incredibly efficient tool: The human brain can process an image in just a few milliseconds, so the right picture can spark someone's interest and convince a viewer it's worth exploring a new show in a single glance. Which is why, in 2014, Netflix began gathering consumer research specifically about the images on its service.
The research indicated that looking at images not only prompted users to watch content, but accounted for a whopping 82% of their time spent browsing (as opposed to, say, reading movie titles or descriptions). In other words, the images mattered almost four times more than the text describing the storyline. Members also spent only 1.8 seconds considering each title. "We know that if you don't capture a member's attention within 90 seconds, he or she will likely lose interest and move on to another activity," says Nick Nelson, Netflix's global manager for creative services. "Images become the most efficient and compelling way to help them discover the perfect title as quickly as possible."
Recently, Netflix—which is famously tight-lipped about its own data—has been doing experiments to better understand which images capture our attention and why, and shared some of its findings with Fast Company as well as in a post on its blog. The effort was both science and art: Data scientists analyzed user statistics, while creative teams considered the colors, emotions, and words that appear on pictures. The company tests several images for a single show or movie to try to discover what makes members click. Its first lesson was that images had to be high quality in order to draw viewers in. "We saw one clear thing," Nelson says. "Using better images to represent content significantly increased overall streaming hours and engagement."...
Want to create better social media graphics?
Or learn how to design visuals that capture attention and drive traffic?
Sure you do. Because you know that the right graphic can put your content on the map.
So where do you go when you want to learn a new skill? Straight to the best!
And that’s exactly why I chose this group of visual marketing pros.
Each one knows how to create attention-grabbing visuals. But more than that, they know how to create images with mass appeal. Follow these 26 visual marketing experts to see how you can crush your next visual campaign!...
Our biggest aim at Buffer is to help you share content on social media in better ways. I wanted to look at ways we can help you with this entire process, from finding the content to sharing it, to analyzing your social media posts. So I’ve uncovered some cool ways to do these things that you might not already know....
Online retail video views are growing at a rapid pace and influencing shopper behavior, a new study finds. However, it’s specific video content, not just mere brand exposure, that’s largely dictating shopping behavior.
Invodo’s Video Conference Benchmarks Report gathered data from 100 retail clients across a wide range of verticals, and the findings were impressive: Marketing videos displayed to online shoppers made a conversion 1.6 times more likely. That figure was the average across all retail clients, but the top performers well outpaced the field, with the best video campaigns increasing the likelihood of a purchase by 3.3 times.
Do you want to create posts that generate higher user engagement?
Are your visuals driving social media traffic?
People engage better with visual content because it’s easier to understand, can tell a story and evoke emotions more easily than written posts.
In this article I’ll show you 11 ways to increase social sharing and fan engagement with images....
When it comes to marketing your business, social media engagement is the best way to go. The question is, which social media would you go for?
If you have already created a Facebook page, then you then you have made a great start. Your next step should be pinning with the queen of visual social media networks, Pinterest.
Shareaholic.com reveals that Pinterest has increased its traffic driving capacity up to 7.10% from 4.79% in just three months (from December 2013 to March 2014). This 48% increase has a huge effect for brand exposure through digital marketing in products such as books, magazines, antiques, services, and even IT/computing....
Visual content is the most powerful tool your brand can use to engage your fans on social media. It allows you to express ideas quickly and effectively, which is a valuable tactic to set your brand apart from the vast amount of written content published online every day.
So which kinds of visual content works best on social media? The best answer: a variety. Finding clever and creative ways to mix up your visual content will boost your fan interaction and help your build your brand's identity on social.
In this article, I’ll show you how to create a series of visual social media posts quickly and effectively. I'll also offer a few ideas to help you get started creating inspiring and effective visual posts....
Are you advertising on social media?
Do you want more attention for your social media ads?
The way you design your ad impacts how much attention it gets with social media.
In this article you’ll discover what the brain pays attention to and tactics for holding that attention....
Have you looked at what other content creators are doing?Watching what works for others in your industry can help you create content that increases engagement with your own audience.In this article I’ll share how to search Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook for visual content to inspire your own visuals....
The big thing to remember is that we are trying to connect the audience with the story first, and the brand second. No one wants to feel like they are being marketed or sold to. If we think back to when we were kids, stories were told to us so that we could learn from them – in school, by our parents, by our camp counselors, and others. Most of the time there was a lesson to be learned by the story. We listened to the story to understand the most important question – Why?
People still want to know the why, but today it’s more related to “why is this important to me at this moment?” A good visual story will help to answer that question still sitting in our heads. Visual storytelling should connect the audience – whomever or wherever that audience is – with the story that is being told and by whom. Visuals don’t need to be fancy to be effective. If we use tools like Excel, we have the ability to make a chart. Charts don’t need to be super creative or fancy to be effective. Still, we know that anything that you can create that helps the audience to understand the content better and faster is more effective.
According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images. Ninety-four percent! If I were to tell you that you could expand your reach by 94% by doing something fairly simple, I'm guessing you wouldn't think twice.
Of course, "simple" is relative. I don't mean you should take five minutes to scope out some stock photos and then insert them randomly into your posts. To get more eyeballs on your blog, you'll have to be more strategic than that -- and this blog post will help you get started with that strategy.
Follow the eight tips below to learn data-driven tips that will help you squeeze the most value out of images in your blog posts....
When it comes to online imagery, it’s not so much about having images, as it is about making sure those images to give the visitor a sense of texture, size, scale, detail, context & brand.According to MDG Advertising, 67% of online shoppers rated high quality images as being “very important” to their purchase decision, which was slightly more than “product specific information”, “long descriptions”, and “reviews & ratings”....
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It’s no secret that visual content is powerful. Numerous studies show that our ability to recall information increases significantly when it’s presented as an image rather than plain text.
That’s why infographics, despite the fact that they are everywhere, are still effective when done well.
Infographics are still effective when done well says @sujanpatel. #contentmarketing CLICK TO TWEET
What that means, as summarized by Jeff Bullas, is that an infographic (and visual content as a whole) should:
- Blend seamlessly into the user experience
- Fit the platform used to share it
- Offer genuine value — never an aggressive attempt to sell
- Be bite-sized — quick and easy to consume
- Relate to the things your audience cares about
- Be consistent in style and tone
What if you wanted to place text or an arrow on your Facebook cover photo without it getting covered by the profile photo? And what about the shared link thumbnails on Facebook or in-stream photos on Twitter ... how big should those be?
If you're looking for a detailed guide to social media photo sizes -- including recommended dimensions, minimum and maximum dimensions, image scale, and more -- then this is it.
The infographic below from Jamie Spencer of MakeAWebsiteHub.com is a great reference to bookmark or keep close-at-hand the next time you're creating an image for your social media profile.
The posts on this blog are typically 2,000 words long. Would you honestly read them if they were nothing but text? Sure, some of you would (and that’s amazing, thank you), but I could never blame anyone for not wanting to read a giant block of text.
This is why articles that include images get 94% more total views than articles that don’t.
Remember though, that stat is just an average. If you use images well, your traffic could increase even more.
It’s a win-win: you get more pageviews, and your readers get to enjoy reading more digestible content.
While social media isn’t the same as your blog posts, it illustrates the power of great images.
Posts on Facebook that include an image get 53% more likes than posts without an image. Additionally, they also make up 93% of the most engaging posts....
Do you create your own images for social media?
Are you happy with their performance?
With a few simple tweaks, you can optimize images for greater visibility on social media and in search engine results.
In this article you’ll find three tips to optimize your social media images for better online performance.
Are you one of Instagram’s over 300 million users? Are you behind any of the 30 billion images that have been pinned on Pinterest? Have you watched some of the over 1 billion Facebook videos viewed on the social network every day?
I’ve yet to come across someone arguing that images don’t work on social media. We all love visuals, and the statistical evidence is there to back it up. Pinterest is second only to Facebook in driving referral traffic to websites. Tweets with photos get 35 percent more retweets on average. The list goes on and on.
Visuals are your key to success on social media. But not everyone who attaches an image to every Google+ post or Tweet is seeing their following grow or their engagement increase. This is because not all images are treated equal on social media. There are a number of factors which influence how well your image will perform, and how it will contribute to the success of your post.
So how do you choose social media images? We’ve offered some guidelines below...
From the days of hand cut letterforms, through the wave of digital technology and into current day, logo design has wonderfully transformed, adapted and shape-shifted. What logo design trends lie ahead in 2015?Here are 10 predictions based on logo designs of recent times....
Big or small, short or tall – the size and scale of elements within your designs will determine the overall balance and hierarchy of your composition.
Creating a harmonious design using scale is a clever way to approach your layout construction as it will allow tiers of information to speak for themselves.In this post we show you some skillful ways to tackle the application of scale to your designs, while creating beautiful and visually pleasing graphics...
Visual content could well be the secret sauce you’ve been seeking to juice up your marketing plan. Research has shown that our brains process visual images much faster and more easily than words – written or spoken. And reportedly, most of the information received by our brains (90 percent) actually is visual.
In addition to faster, easier processing (or perhaps because of it) visual content is also more shareable. Visual building products marketing content such as photos, videos, infographics and even visual “memes” may prove effective within a campaign, on your social media platforms, and on your website.Here’s how to best leverage four types of visual content for building product marketing....
Are you posting images across social networks?
Do you use them to extend your brand recognition?
The way logos, fonts and colors work together in social media images is an important part of gaining brand attention.In this article you’ll discover how to make your social profiles and visual content align to reinforce your brand and catch your audience’s eye....
Last week, we published Marketer’s toolbox for creating amazing visual content, featuring 33 apps to easily create visual content like a graphic for a blog post, infographics, memes, gifs and videos. The post has been a massive hit with more than 8k reads in the last 7 seven days.
You might ask: has such visual content been effective for businesses? and to what extent?
So, we decided to search for some proven examples of how businesses really used visual content. In this post, we have tried to feature some businesses who have used different forms of visual content effectively. Hope these examples will inspire you to explore different channels of content marketing....
No design experience?
No problem! Let's start from scratch and get familiar with the basic Canva tools that will help you create amazing designs.
Design Essentials will guide you through simple tools and techniques that will help you create designs you can proudly share with the world.
Fonts bring your words to life. Learn how to easily choose fonts that emphasize your message and make your designs look beautiful.
Color can be used to convey moods and create emphasis in your designs. We show you how to build meaningful color relationships to create visually stunning graphics.
Whether you upload your own, or choose from our library of over a million, images are a vital component of eye-catching designs. Learn how to use simple Canva tools to compose and enhance your images for greater visual impact....
Results of the second annual PR Newswire/PR News Survey are in and they are both stunning and unremarkable. Stunning: more than half of those surveyed say less than 5% of their external communications are delivered via video, which, given all we know now, makes me feel like we’re not paying attention. If just one minute of video communicates the equivalent of 1.8 million words of text and video is shared 1200% more than links and text combined, then why are so many of us still on the sidelines?
Unremarkable: less than 5% of overall PR budgets of those surveyed are devoted to video content. I mean, yeah, duh. That’s self-evident. If there’s no money in the kitty earmarked for visual content, then none will be created. But we have to do something about that, because visual content is what our audiences expect. It’s what they’re consuming on their phones, their tablets and their computers. Staying in step with audience preferences when it comes to content type is something PR can’t overlook.
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Practical tips on making your images more shareable.