Are You Prepared for Visual Social Media Marketing?
It's becoming clearer and clearer that images are the key to breaking through the clutter of social media and reaching consumers. So how can you take advantage of this trend?
It's becoming clearer and clearer that images are the key to breaking through the clutter of social media and reaching consumers. So how can you take advantage of this trend?
I recently released my third book, Visual Social Media Marketing, after I noticed a trend in social media content, as well as the implications for businesses. Looking at the trends across social networks and Web content, one thing is undeniable – in order for content to be shared online, it must be visual.
Consider these statistics:
In addition, the quickest-growing social networks and applications are visual. Flipboard, a visual news app, was the number one application when the iPad launched. Pinterest and Instagram are the two quickest-growing social networks, and both focus on visual communications.
The trends are clear – images are the key to breaking through the clutter of social media. With 88 percent of businesses now on social networks, it is more important than ever to build a strategy that involves the content that your audience actually wants. Increasingly, that content is visual.
Why Does Visual Content Break Through?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This is true. We can communicate more information faster with images versus text. Since we are sifting through lots of information online, our brains are naturally drawn to the content that gets the message across quickly. Images break through the clutter and immediately and quickly communicate messages.
Why Does It Matter?
The reality is that images are leading social content for sharing. Meaning that images are highly viewed, engaged with, shared, and clicked on social networks. If you want your website content shared across visual social networks, you need to have a strong image strategy. Many websites, like MarthaStewart.com, report that visual social marketing is the number one source of traffic to their website.
I realized this a few months ago, when I researched how content from www.BootCampDigital.com was shared on Pinterest. I immediately noticed that a picture of me had been pinned. As I investigated I realized that the pinner was sharing a link to our Google+ report. The Web page with the report included the entire report, however it didn’t have an image of the report – it only had a few random logos and a picture of me in the sidebar.
The lack of images on our website made it difficult for fans to share the report, and having an irrelevant image was limiting the amount of traffic that we were generating from Pinterest and other social networks. We added an image to represent the report, and found that traffic to the report page from social media sites increased, because there was a relevant image to support the page.
How Can You Take Advantage of This Trend?
There are three main opportunities for marketers to take advantage of this trend.
Don’t delay any longer – images are dominating content that travels online, so take advantage of these sites before your competitors do.