There”s no doubt that we”re moving toward a more visual marketing world. As users, we often prefer consuming visual content to reading blocks of text. In fact, Facebook users are uploading approximately 300 million photos to Facebook per day, up 20% from earlier this year. Even usage of the photo-sharing tool Instagram, purchased by Facebook in April of 2012, has increased 1,179% in six months. But as a business, will catering to this new trend in visual content have a positive impact on crucial engagement metrics, including Facebook Likes, comments, and potentially even link clicks?
There is no doubt about the fact that we are moving towards a more visual world. It is because, we as users tend to consume visual content more often compared to the text. But is this going to impact brands in terms of their engagement metrics and virality is the next big question.
Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, all of these social media sites have really flourished in visual marketing in the past year and continue to do so now also. Nowadays, almost all the businesses are learning to ‘Show’. Not ‘Tell’. Beautiful content and magnificent designs have largely fuelled the visual marketing category on social media. Some time ago it was believed that “content is the king”, but today, looking at the visual impact it is clearly evident that “a picture is really worth a thousand words.”
When brands moved from blogs to Facebook updates, the posts became shorter followed by Twitter that shortened the posts to 140 characters. That’s not all, as now brands even skip the word bit and are moving to social media platform like Pinterest for visual communication.
As technology is becoming more advanced, people are also adapting themselves to this trend aggressively and with a fast pace. The shifting habit of technology users has resulted into this fascinating trend of visuals. People are trying to engage more and more on social media through their smartphones now as they have realized that clicking pictures while they are moving or on the go is less tiresome than actually typing an update on a keyboard.
Cover Photos
Fanta Facebook Cover in 3D was a major attraction amongst the consumers and was like a visual treat for them. it was appreciated across the Facebook page of Fanta and created a mark.
Photo Albums
Upload photos of your products or what your brand is talking in creative ways.
Oreo is a great example of creative display of a product.
Economic Times had launched a campaign ET Against Half Knowledge on Facebook wherein they showcased fantastic doodles to support the facts of the campaign. It was very creatively designed and garnered huge response & engagement.
– You can create multiple boards with images that relate to your brand.
– Make sure each board contains relevant visual content.
– Do describe your brand in few words. Users are on Pinterest to pin, not to read.
– Use the content related to your product to help promote your own & categorize your boards.
A brand post that includes an album or a picture receives more engagement from fans than a text-based post. The ultimate fact that Pinterest has shot to social media stardom is its image-based platform & the surging popularity of infographics both point towards the fact that “consumers want images, and that too lots of them.”
Brand managers can create an amazing look and feel for their brands with a proper social media design strategy using photos and videos of their brand message. It will not only reinforce the brand credibility but will also make your brand stand out from the crowd.
It is also found that when people share something or when they engage with their friends on social media its mostly pictures that they have enjoyed the most in. In terms of brands, a large number of people are more likely to engage with brands that post pictures. Pictures have therefore, created a unique place as a brand post by standing out from the clutter of too much text or words. Pictures or visual imagery stand out and provide a gist of what a particular post, update or an article or any content is talking about. The image or post, when attractive, urge the user to click on it and read to know about the update. Pictures have, to a large extent become a short form of communicating great chunk of information; that too quickly and with ease.
Going ahead with the idea of picture it is indeed an effective step that brands can take to evolve in the industry.
How will this visual stimulation help brands?
To cite an example, a lot of fashion brands use visual social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook to market their products or collection. It’s the visual fantasy that sells a product in the fashion world. As customers prefer to see a particular designer piece of clothing on a model and visualize it as a suitable piece for their clothing. Visual media works here in a great way as when pictures that inspire the designs are shared, more and more consumers get enticed to your brand. Instagram, through which brand can opt for sharing a personal look also, is being used broadly across the globe. The visual content strategy by brands can mostly focus on user-generated content where they can ask the users to participate in a particular project; contest etc. by posting their own videos and images.Till date the social media managers for different brands, experiment with the content they have produced, and then monitor it on a weekly, monthly or a quarterly basis to check what is most striking with the customers or audiences. Striking the right balance between the ideas, content and visual imagery is the most important. The idea has to be relevant, attention grabbing, shareable and consisting of variety.
Now, the time has arrived for all the brands to get seen & get known.
The more a brand message is seen online, the more happy consumers feel with your products. And when they are happy with your brand, they instantly become the dominant voice for you in the industry, attract other clients easily & also share their views on social media. On the whole, help your message go viral increasing the credibility of your brand.
People instantly become comfortable with your brand when you increase the online visibility; it creates an impact on their minds.
Image Credits:
The Shift to Visual Social Media Infographic and screen shot
(sociallysorted.com.au)
Well, brands need not put their integrity and authenticity at stake; they just need to take an effort to get seen. Now Facebook is such a platform, where Facebook users get excited about anything and everything with attractive imagery and content and share it with their friends. Therefore, images attain more visibility. Visual marketing by a brand leads to more recognition, more trust and higher engagement.
Have you ever noticed on the bottom left of your Facebook post where it shows or tells you how many people have seen it? You might have say 3000 likes and just 80 people who have seen it; you would be like, what is this happening? How come?
The mechanism that works here is that everyone who has liked your page does not automatically view your posts. Facebook has EdgeRank, which is the way through which they determine how far your posts will reach. To be more precise, you, as a brand would need engagement to get more views to your post.
When more people like, comment & share your posts; Facebook allows your posts to reach more people. Therefore, images are a must have for your marketing mix.
Quality is very essential, you just cant risk the image of your brand by using a low quality image. Your visual marketing efforts should in the end turn out to be a present to your customers. Your brand should by all means aesthetically appeal to their eyes and exceed their expectations.
With so much of chatter & clicking happening on social media channels in today’s age, it is important to create content that is attractive enough. For this, brands should in the primary stage, not pursue audiences first, instead track the platforms where consumers engage with the video, image or article shared. So, basically brands should at first consider the channel through which they will spread their content across.
Entrepreneurs and brand managers, post embracing the importance of images & videos should take steps to optimize their visual content to attain real traction on social media platforms.
Marketing should be kept consistent
Bring to light the personality of your brand & gain an idea of the type of content that your followers or consumers get attracted to. Once it is known you can post what gets most traction. And people will look up to your posts and message everyday.
Infographics: Invest in them
Its an absolutely neat way to combine visuals & text to put the message across. Infographics go viral across the social media platforms and are one of the best ways to communicate & engage. It can be used as a thoughtful and fun tool and widely used on Facebook and Pinterest.
Tell a real story
Images that brands post should, like the words tell a remarkable story. A great amount of time and money needs to be invested in the same to create such pieces of image or visuals.
Pair the video and text
Creating a video content is the key to success. Place a good quality video with the text content. Do keep in mind that poor quality videos if posted foster great loss for the brand.
Be very sure of your Brand message
Its easy to post videos and photos on social media for branding. But, a visual that complements and is in lines with your brand message is worth more than a thousand shares and repins. It is because if people look at your videos and photos and they know that your brand or company is behind it, it is the most positive instance.
Visuals should be formatted properly
Before displaying your visuals on social media platforms, make sure they are of proper size, width, height, resolution and according to the platform you are posting on. The timeline image, the highlighted image, pictures for Twitter, Pinterest etc. should all be nothing but perfect.
Visual social media is the technique by which brands can get marketing data to customers than they would by using other means of advertising. Well, this has worked to boost sales. This form of social media is here to stay. Even, new websites that easily enable consumers to share photos & video are being created almost every day. Brands will therefore reach out to their customers in different ways.
It is clearly evident that brands that will be able to resonate with the power of visual marketing or media will be amongst the top market leaders in times to come.
The rise of social media platforms like Pinterest & Instagram, followed by Facebook’s acquisition of the latter strongly shows how visual content is actually becoming the powerful online communication force. This would surely ensure an increase in engagement & interest by offering people more of what they want. Also, today in this social media era, even the search engines rank the brand content based on the interactions, shares and engagement. Don’t you think, to inspire viral marketing, brands should use visual content on their social media channels? How do you think the engagement will get increase?