Increase your social reach with eye catching visual content

Great guest post by Fergus Ryan 4th Level #Digital Media helps co’s w/ #SocialMedia & Digital strategy. Collab w/ @Open_feed #MMA guy for @98fm | @independent_ie | @eirSport, see more by him here.

The need for eye catching visual content has never been more important.

Take your high speed Twitter timeline. If the average half-life of a tweet is somewhere around 20 minutes, you need to stand out immediately.

Plain old text is not going to cut it anymore.

You need eye catching visual content to make a real impression.

Over 60% of social networks are made up of images. As we will see later in this post, information presented as an image iseasier for people to consume.

As you’ll see from the infographic later in this post are brains are hard wired to consume eye catching visual content. We process an image 60,000 faster than text. 90% of the information our brain processes is visual.

In a previous post I referenced this great HubSpot article on why we need images…

• For ENGAGEMENT – Researchers found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%

• For INFO RE-CALL – When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.

• For COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE – Only 27% of marketers have a process in place to aggregate, organize, and manage the visual assets being used across their marketing teams.

• For VIRALITY – Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

• For SHARES – Articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.

Eye catching visual content and the Cone of Experience

Not only will eye catching visual content play a role in creating social media posts but it can also be the backbone to your content and Calls To Actions (CTA).

If you work your way down the Edgar Dale Cone of Experience you can you can see ways of both re-purposing content and applying a CTA.

Source: www.td.org

For example, people remember…

• 10% of what they read – create a killer blog post
  ? CTA –  listen to our podcast

• 20% of what they hear – re-purpose the blog post into a podcast episode
  ? CTA –  download the SlideShare PDF

• 30% of what they see – re-purpose the blog post again into an infographic or SlideShare presentation
  ? CTA – sign up for our event/webinar

• 50% of what they see and hear – stage an event or webinar based on the blog post content
  ? CTA – attend our training

• 70% of what they say and write – create a workshop or training module on the topic
  ? CTA -execute you learnings in your business, retain us to oversee the project

• 90% of what they do – empower people to go out and practise what they learn
  ? CTA – Measure results, need advanced training?

All of the above, including your blog post will need eye catching visual content.

Release your inner Van Gogh

At one point in time creating a images or videos for marketing was an expensive practise. Unless you had the capability in house you would have needed to hire a design agency.

Today there are a plethora of online tools that make production pretty simple.

This blog post will show you where to source images and recommend some tools to help you customize and format the images ? Use these free resources to create powerful images

Here is a fantastic post by Joanne Sweeney-Burke which outlines some tools to help you create animations and videos ? 6 Video Tools to Ignite Your Social Marketing

And finally…

I thought this infographic by QuickSprout was fantastic.

It provides you all the information to support you making the argument to create and use images/video for your business. It also gives you great hints and tips as to how and where you can get started.

 

What did you think?

Do you use images in your content and social posts? What tools do you use to create them?

Drop a comment below and let me know what you think.

It’d be great to  connect on social media if you like… I’m probably on Twitter the most @GusRyan100

Thanks for reading.

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