Making an impact with visual content on social media
What do you see when you log in to your social media accounts?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be confronted with trending news stories, cat photos, engagement announcements, envy inducing holiday snaps of friends lounging poolside and, of course, a smattering of social concern posts.
Now consider this. According to ACI, every minute in 2014:
The stats aren’t in for 2015 yet, but there’s no evidence to suggest that these figures will have decreased.
This represents the digital marketer’s challenge – how can your social content cut through the noise and truly make an impact? If your content isn’t working for you, then the resources you are investing in social media are wasted.
This infographic from Kissmetric suggests that images are the key for higher engagement on Facebook.
This is backed up by research conducted by Buzzsumo, who analysed over 100 million articles and found that including at least one image in your content on Facebook and Twitter leads to much higher engagement.
Similarly, Adobe and Software Advice conducted the first ever social media content optimisation survey, which concluded that using images was the most important tactic for optimising content across social media platforms.
The golden rules of visual content creation
So if visual content is key – how do you make sure it’s good? Market Domination Media have five golden rules for strong visual content creation:
- Identify an awesome topic – this means knowing your audience well, and developing visual content that they will enjoy and want to share.
- Select the best content type – types to consider include:
- Infographics: these are 30% more likely to be read than purely text-based content.
- Images: on average images get 128% more retweets than videos.
- Videos: including a video increases the likelihood of consumers purchasing a product by 64%.
- Create an attractive and effective design – some elements to consider:
- Typography: fonts must suit your brand and be legible to communicate your message. Do not use Comic Sans.
- Illustrations: use to complement and strengthen your message.
- Simplicity: avoid busy designs with too many elements.
- Accuracy: report all figures accurately to avoid misleading your audience.
- Identify potential content promoters – these could include:
- your brand’s existing customer base and social media audience.
- collaborators or business partners.
- blogs or related social media channels.
- Create a promotional strategy – as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Strategy before content creation
The five golden rules above are all important things to bear in mind when creating visual content. However, I would order them differently.
In my opinion, strategy should always come before content creation. To identify an awesome topic that your audience will enjoy necessitates knowing who your target audience(s) is/are. One of the first steps of developing a promotional strategy is identifying your target audiences.
Developing a promotional strategy after you’ve created your content risks becoming an exercise in trying to fit a square peg in to a round hole.
Another important element that is not covered in the five golden rules but should always be considered are key performance indicators – what are you hoping to achieve and how will you measure success? This will be the topic of my next blog post.