How Visual Social Media Content Strengthens Your Business
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are no longer the only social media platforms businesses should have profiles on if they want to engage their market online. The past few years have seen a shift towards visual social media content—the kind that sites like Pinterest and Instagram provide. Savvy businesses have taken advantage of this shift by promoting their brand through visual content on all of the above platforms, as well as through impactful, relevant images, videos, and graphics on their website. There are two big reasons why this shift towards visual content is taking place and why your business will benefit from following suit.
Quickly Consumed, Bite-Sized Content
When your business markets using photographs (and visual quotes, comics, and some info-graphics) it offers compact, “snackable” pieces of information for clients to consume. It doesn’t take much time or effort to simply look at a photograph on a computer screen—in fact it is almost impossible not to look–but even a single frame includes a lot of information. The eye is naturally enticed by and drawn to visual content because images contain so much information that can be consumed and assimilated in such a small amount of time. This fact alone–that viewers are far more drawn to this easily-consumed style of content—is reason enough for businesses to begin putting more emphasis on visual marketing.
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The Power of Suggestion
We’ve all heard the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and we have all experienced the truth of this dictum when viewing famous photographs.
While we are all moved by emotionally-charged images from history or images in the news, in actuality every photograph is packed with thousands of pieces of data—the photo’s content, subject matter, lighting, saturation, focus, medium, color scheme, setting, words (if any)—and these data evoke feeling in the viewer. Even a single glance at, say, a poster advertising an action movie elicits feelings of excitement, anxiety, fear, stress—all in milliseconds. Even if the emotional response is subtle and fleeting, a connection has been made: a bright, cheerful image will associate your business’ name with exactly those feelings. On the contrary, reading a plot summary for the same movie takes many seconds or even minutes, and social media users are far less likely to stop their scrolling to read a lengthy description when they can gain all the information they need about the movie from a simple 2-second glance at its ad image. When your business puts its name on an image that evokes the type of feelings that draw customers to your product or service, it increases the likelihood that these customers will have a positive experience with your business and keep coming back.
[Tweet “Even if the emotional response is subtle and fleeting, a connection has been made.”]
As the amount of data and content available on the Internet continues to grow, businesses that want their social media posts to pack a punch will take advantage of viewers’ readiness to take in visuals. Jennie Lyon Virtual Assistant Services offers a range of Photoshop and visual content services including creation of visual quotes for your business’ content marketing. How does your business use photography or graphics in its content marketing?
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