The old adage that a picture paints a thousand words is nowhere more pertinent than in the field of social media marketing. We are visual animals and we process images more readily than we do written text. They catch our eye, pique our interest and create an emotional response that simple words often can’t do.

Why Graphics Are Important for Successful Social Media Marketing

According to HubSpot, a colour picture or visual medium such as a video can increase the possibility of someone clicking on a link in Twitter and reading your post by 80%. When an image is associated with a piece of information we are much more likely to remember it than if the information is provided on its own. That may be why of those top marketers in charge of media marketing departments around the world, 65% believe that visual media are key to communicating their brand and telling its story.

How Things Have Changed

The reason why graphics are so much more important nowadays is that we are constantly bombarded with information. Whether that’s on our PCs, mobile phones, tablets, on the TV or as we walk down the street. This has led to many believing that our attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter. We’ve become accustomed to a content overload and are more likely to ignore something if it doesn’t catch our attention straight away.

Actually, the problem is that there are so many more avenues vying for our attention and getting content to stand out from the crowd is becoming increasingly vital if you want to market your brand on social media. There are literally millions of attempts to reach out and contact us most of which we delete whilst processing what is important to us. We become nose blind to similar kinds of information once we have assimilated the relevant information, if it is not hitting our ‘What’s in it for me’ then it is ignored before it hits our conscious thoughts. In the great big pot of ‘white noise’ on social media a post will really have to grab you to get through, which is where images play such a big role.

Next time you are on a social media platform, make a note of the number of times your eye is ‘caught’ by a striking image. Posts that are simply text tend to flow by and they all begin to look the same pretty quickly. According to social media news site Sendible:

“Images have a strong emotional factor, and emotions have a powerful pull on us. The right picture can bring out strong emotions in us of compassion, joy, disgust, or even hate, a fact long known by sociologists, psychiatrists, marketers and politicians alike.”

The stats don’t lie either. On Facebook, posts with images get a staggering 150% more likes than posts that just have text. This could also be the underlying reason why sites such as Pinterest and Instagram are becoming much more popular – they are largely image sites with just a limited amount of text.

Simply from a marketing point of view, adding an image to your social media posts can greatly improve your chances of a) being noticed, and b) someone clicking on the link to your website.

If you’re not convinced about images, here are few other stats that may help change your mind:

• Shoppers who look at a video of a product are nearly twice as likely to buy than those who don’t.
• Infographics get liked and shared three times as much on social media than other content.
• And finally, if you post visual content on social media, it is 40 times more likely to be shared than other content.

If you would like to discuss any element of your social media marketing then call our content and graphic specialists on 01604 654545 or email sales@thelasthurdle.co.uk