How Images Help Social Media Marketing

For the most part, those of us who own blogs have gotten a little stuck in the whole ‘content marketing’ aspect of things. We have spent so long perfecting the way we communicate with words that we could put together a post in a half an hour and be assured of the traffic it will draw. It just becomes habit, and ends up leaking into other forms of marketing campaigns we embark on. Like, for example, social media.

Have you ever been on Facebook and seen a massive wall of text from the owner of the page? That is one way to pick out a blogger among the crowd. They continue on the same habit they have picked up through writing on their site, and they don’t even realize that they are missing the point. Social media is a way to engage users through multiple mediums, and the best way to catch their attention is through visuals.

Images are a big boost to social media, and they should be a part of your posts as often as possible. Here are some reasons why:

• Visual content is more shareable, and people are more likely to repost a graphic than they are to copy/paste a status comment.
• A preview image with a link tends to grab the attention of the viewer more effectively, and on sites like Facebook it will also provide the headline instead of just a glimpse at the link.
• Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site on the web, and is a great way to expand your social marketing into a purely visual field.
• A full 98% of Pinterest users also have a Twitter or Facebook account, according to a survey by PriceGrabber. This improves your chances of having images cross-posted to other accounts.
• An engaging screen cap from a video will make the casual skimmer more likely to stop and view the clip.
• An image can quickly convey a message that is likely to stick. Human beings are very visual creatures, and we are more likely to recall something that we can relate visually.

• Dan Zarrella found that images ranked the highest for likes and shares on Facebook. If you take a look at your friend feed, it becomes very obvious that he is right…most of what is shared is inevitably an image, or has a related image.
• Users can become involved through providing their own images. This goes back to engagement, which can really be driven by asking people on your social media accounts to share their pictures. Contests run on this principle always get a lot of interest.

• A study done by Anson Alexander found that high quality infographics were read 30 times more than text articles, and traffic grew 12% faster when those infographics were published than those posts that didn’t contain one.

Do you have a reason or two about why it is important to use images in social media marketing? Let us know in the comments!

***Image Credits: Smart Photo Stock -> Feel free to choose yours using our free collection for bloggers!***