Visual Content on Social Media: How to Use It to Improve Engagement

If you’ve been using social media to market your business, then you know the key is customer engagement – find out how to use your visual content.

When it comes to capturing the attention of your audience, social media marketing is becoming a real struggle.

You probably know the feeling when you post several social media updates a day, but you’re lucky just to get a few likes. Today, when marketers compete with so much engaging and interactive content in various formats, a simple headline and a link will go unnoticed. This is why the importance of visual content on social media for getting the attention of your followers, customers, and prospects is so important.

Visual content helps companies convey their message across different channels in an engaging and precise way, making it a must-have feature for marketing messages. These are a few solid reasons why you should invest your effort, money, and time into creating appealing visual content, researching the types of visual content you can create, and finding out how they can contribute to your social media marketing strategy.

Why is visual content on social media so important?

Nowadays, everyone knows that a plain textual content doesn’t perform as well as visual content. Of all the posts published last year, 80.20% were photos and videos, which were responsible for 92.15% of all interactions that the best global brands received on Facebook. As for the volume of visual content there, there was an upward trend from one quarter to the next.

Social media marketers favor visual content because of the advantage it offers in terms of audience engagement. Visual content allows the audience to process visually represented information better, as opposed to textual content. Customers are more likely to make a purchase if they get a chance to see the product and all its functions before they decide to buy it.

Types of visual content

Images

When a body of text is split up into smaller segments with some high-quality and contextually relevant images, people are more inclined to finish their reading. Our attention span is shorter than ever because of the increased popularity of the mobile Internet and oversaturation of digital content. This makes a plain textual content very off-putting, unlike articles with images that get a lot more views.

Also, you’re probably familiar with the fact that 65% of people are visual learners, and most of the information we process (about 90%) is visual. For example, people are easily engaged by pictures of famous locations, such as the Golden Gate bridge, so if you’re targeting location-based audience, tailor your posts and use free city images to reach them.

Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

Videos

If you want to present a common problem and then offer a solution in the form of your product/service, you’ll find videos to be incredibly useful. There are different types of videos you can enhance your business with: animated explainer videos, customer testimonials, demonstrations, and how-to videos. It’s very important for them to match the overall aesthetics and style of your brand.

Facebook users spend 3X more time watching live videos than traditional videos.

Live videos

Many brands consider live videos to be the best interactive format for engaging with their audience. They boost your engagement and reach, as Facebook users can post questions about what’s being broadcasted, while the presenters can answer them right then and there. This adds to their credibility and provides them with valuable insight into the problems and worries of potential clients.

Live video is more appealing to brand audiences:

80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog

 

and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.

Infographics

If you have a body of complex data and statistics that you want to present to your customers, infographics are a great tool for collating it into an easily understandable and compelling visual display. Infographics can become a vital part of your content marketing strategy, but to reap the best results of it, you need to make the design and layout as impactful as possible. Many businesses hire the design of infographics out to professional designers, but this isn’t always necessary.

We polled a number of small businesses and they all agreed that one of the biggest roadblocks they faced when trying to create infographics is design.

Well, the team at Visme put together an impressive infographic design guide. This guide is built to help marketers and non-designers create compelling infographics, that are both informational and aesthetically pleasing, from scratch. This guide is easy to follow and comes complete with some pretty impressive templates.

Remember to include a hyperlink to your website (where the full image should be located) and a thumbnail image whenever you share your infographic on social media.

Infographics are “liked” and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content.

Memes

Memes are images accompanied by humorous captions. When they first started gaining traction, not many people had believed that memes would play a role in marketing. They were created and shared by college students for entertainment, but today memes are a quirky, easy-to-create form of visual content. By creating your own meme, you’ll be able to evoke positive emotions, create in-jokes about your niche, and build a community around your brand. However, you first need to see whether they’re appropriate for your niche and will they engage your target audience.

Leverage influencers to promote your visual content

If nobody sees your content, what’s the point? However, by getting influencers to share your visual content on their social media profiles, they’ll help you increase the exposure of your content, and reach new audiences. This will eventually result in more backlinks, traffic, and a huge SEO boost. If you don’t know how to identify influencers in your industry niche, there are tools you can use for help.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool that allows you to find influencers based on keywords. You can filter them by the type of people you need (from journalists to companies to bloggers), and by date to find those who recently shared articles of the similar or same topic. Next, you just need an outreach pitch to convince the influencers to share your content.

Mention

With Mention, you can look for influencers who are talking about your niche on Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of the Internet. You can see each influencer’s interests, which will help in deciding who to reach out to. Once you’ve chosen them, you can engage with them directly from the Mention’s dashboard.

Summary

If you’re thinking about redirecting your marketing efforts to make them more effective in 2018, you need to know what stimulates online engagement and growth best. The truth is that textual content will always be an integral part of every marketing campaign. However, if you really want to set yourself apart, visual content must play a central role in your digital marketing efforts.