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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....
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.
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.
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....
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.
Through experimentation and iteration, we’ve found that including images when sharing to social media increases engagement across the board—more clicks, reshares, replies, and favorites. In one experiment, retweets alone more than doubled for updates with images compared to those without.
Using images in social media posts is well worth trying with your profiles.
As a small business owner or a one-man marketing team, is this something you can pull off by yourself?
At Buffer, we create all the images for our blogposts and social media sharing without any outside design help. We rely on a handful of amazing tools and resources to get the job done, and I’ll be happy to share with you the ones we use and the extras that we’ve found helpful or interesting....
According to 3M Corporation, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. And on Facebook alone, our own research shows that photos generate 53% more likes than the average post.
Recent trends and studies are clearly highlighting a new wave of visual content consumption patterns. Even if you've never designed anything before, or never even dreamed of being a designer, in order to succeed in today's marketing world, you need to create visual content. And not having enough budget is no longer an excuse either, as improved technology and access to tools and software has made it more and more possible for mere marketing mortals to work on their design chops.
To help you get started with visual content, this post will specifically give you a helpful cheat sheet you can bookmark and reference when creating the cover photos for your business' various social media accounts....
...But successful content marketing doesn’t just involve writing and technology decisions. The images that go along with a story work just as hard to convey your business’s value and message. In fact, as videos, infographics, and photo-centric social networks like Instagram and Pinterest continue to gain favor, visual content is increasingly being leveraged to engage and inform an audience in uniquely compelling ways.
For the last collaborative post in our latest series, we asked our panel of CMI blog contributors, Online Training instructors, and Content Marketing Worldspeakers for their answers to the question, “What’s the most innovative or interesting example you’ve seen of visual content marketing?” Following are some of the efforts that stood out in their minds:..
New visual based social networking sites like, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and Vine are exploding - is this the future of social media?Get your answer in this infographic courtesy of oracle....
As a writer by trade, it's not easy for me to utter these words, but I'm not going to lie: On social media, a picture is worth a thousand words.
It's true. Content may be king, but visuals rule. All the latest studies and statistics suggest that images on social media command more attention than text alone.
If you want more likes, comments, shares, retweets, and clicks, you want to include pictures with your social media posts. You want to be more visual.
Instagram is becoming a core platform for brands to engage with consumers since it registers consumer engagement 18 times that of Facebook and 48 times that of Twitter, according to the latest report from L2 Think Tank.
The "Intelligence Report: Social Platforms" found that the visual component of Instagram has helped the platform grow to 100 million users with the average luxury brand having 100,000 followers. Other visual platforms such as Vine, Pinterest and YouTube have grown significantly and continue to be platforms for brands to deeply engage with consumers.
"For all the mindshare that it occupies, social media ultimately drives very little ecommerce, less than 0.25 percent, and site traffic, less than 3 percent, for prestige brands," said Danielle Bailey, research lead L2 Think Tank, New York....
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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
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!...
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.
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....
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....
At Marketo we have a pretty interesting and diverse set of infographics – covering topics from marketing automation and social networks, to kittens and bacon. But those are just examples of how versatile infographics can be as a content medium. So why aren’t all marketers leveraging the blockbuster power of infographics?
Infographics for everyone!
Unless your target market hates visual content (we’re not judging!) then infographics are probably something you can add to your content repertoire. They are an awesome way to clearly present complex information. For example, if you have an interesting but dense report that you’d like more people to engage with, try translating that information into an infographic. People absorb visual content faster and with greater ease than reading the same information....
The eBook discusses the visual media era as whole, then seeks to help marketers adapt best practices. Generally, there is one overarching rule: Go mobile or perish. While the desktop is still used, its use is limited to particular tasks. To reach more people, think mobile first, desktop second.Included in the paper are 12 tips for best practices across a variety of media types and social networks. You can see them in the above slideshare or simply scroll below....
If you are marketing to teens (and college-age youths), the time has come to beef up your Instagram presence, as this recent SocialTimes article demonstrates. Here are tips for using Instagram to build your fan base and generate sales revenue, based in large part on what we learned during the successful launch of our sister company, Pro Stock Hockey.
A few quick stats on the company’s Instagram results to date: - 1,972 (highly relevant) followers
- 21,740 likes
- 260 likes/photo
- 99.9 acclaim value
- (BTW, Followers for Instagram is a great Instagram management app)...
Are you proud of your social media cover photos?
Do you want to find out how to improve them?
Your cover photo is the first thing anyone sees when they visit your social media profiles.
Make that first impression a positive one. In this article I’ll share tips to improve the quality and impact of your cover images today....
A look at the data around use of visuals by public relations professionals tells a few different stories. On the one hand, use of visuals in press releases has increased steadily over the last few years, and the majority of communicators (76%, to be exact) surveyed about multimedia use in PR indicated they plan to increase usage.
That said, the great majority of press releases issued by PRNewswire are text-only, with no visual elements...
The team at Tent Social created this infographic that shows the heights and widths of all those images you need to make your social media channels look fantastic.
Brands experience almost 50% more audience engagement when sharing an image or video on their social media platforms, which is why social networks are increasingly featuring and promoting visual content. Optimizing your visual space online is key to achieving maximum exposure for your name and your brand, and helps build your fan base.
It can be difficult to keep up with all the social media image dimensions for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, andYouTube. They seem to change on a regular basis, and often it’s not clear where to look for the correct sizes for cover images, profile pictures, and other graphic elements....
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Practical tips on making your images more shareable.