Social Media’s Visual Revolution

Group Gordon’s Anna Clark blogs about the importance of visuals for a strategic social media effort. 9.25.2014

Whether blogging about your company’s new line of products, tweeting about an upcoming panel discussion, posting to Facebook about your CEO luncheon, or sharing moments from your company-funded charity event on Instagram, images have become a crucial part of any social media story-telling effort.

According to Bob Cargill, content may be king, but visuals rule. Here are three reasons to ensure your social media strategy incorporates visually rich content.

1) Boosting Brand Recognition

Social media has become an essential part of communications and marketing efforts, providing new channels for companies and brands to connect directly with target audiences. However, in our fast-paced digital world, attracting—and keeping—attention through social media is becoming increasingly difficult. Using visuals is one way to make your social media posts stand out and build your brand personality. Sharing images of your logo, the faces behind your company, and fan, client, or customer interaction helps your audience connect with and relate to your brand. This in turn helps to attract new customers while boosting brand familiarity among existing customers.

2) Enhancing Engagement

Images can evoke responses from people in a way that text alone simply cannot. Research shows that use of visuals on social media significantly enhances audience engagement. According to Kissmetrics, including photos in Facebook posts results in 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments, and 84 percent more link click-throughs than posts containing text only. Research also shows that using images in Twitter posts, or tweets, increases retweets by 150 percent and click-throughs by 18 percent.

3) Strengthening SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial in driving traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Traditionally, the key to a successful SEO strategy was updating web content, using relevant tags and keywords, and linking to your site from other websites. Today, social media has become another key element in strengthening SEO, with most companies and brands recognizing the value of having a social media presence. Posting images to social media is a simple yet effective way of boosting SEO because images factor into improved search engine rankings.

Need some inspiration for including images in your social media outreach? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

• Think beyond photos: Be sure to use the full range of images in your social media posts, from photos and memes to infographics, charts, and drawings.
• Share images from events and tradeshows: Whether delivering a keynote speech at an industry event or showcasing your services at a tradeshow, share behind the scenes photos and action shots with your social media following.
• Highlight team members: Share photos of your team and individual staff members to show your audience the faces behind your company and brand.
• Spotlight your fans, clients or customers: Give a shout-out to individual audience members to show them that you care and appreciate their support and business.
• Host a photo contest: Get your fans, clients, and customers to share photos relating to your company and brand. You’ll boost engagement and add another pipeline for visual content.