5 Types of Visual Content You Need to Use in Your Social Media Marketing, From our Friends at PromoRepublic
May 16, 2017 | By Alla Bogdan | No Comments">No Comments
If you are considering adding online content marketing to your outreach strategy, there are a few things that you need to know in order to create growth and increase engagement. While the importance of text is still very significant, graphical material adds a dimension that simply can’t be expressed by words alone. As attention spans continually shorten, large blocks of text become more unbearable. Give your readers what they want!
In light of the data that 65% of people are visual learners and 90% of all information that we encounter every day is visual, graphical content seems a natural way to improve engagement with your audience. The other side of the coin is that low-quality content can potentially harm your chances of success. It is also crucial to ensure that you have the right to use any content that you did not create yourself, so make sure to give proper attribution for anything that you may borrow.
We’ve created a brief list of visual content strategies to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing.
- IMAGES
Images are the simplest form of graphical content. These can take the form of photos, memes, screenshots, or animated gifs.
Use images to break up blocks of text, so the reader will have a chance to digest what they’ve read before going on. Content of this type is most effective when you produce it yourself or use an original piece, as this approach gives a personal feel to the material.
Quotes are easily the most shareable content. Just find some that will match your followers interests and place them in a stunning visual. Don’t forget to customize your posts with a logo.
Check out PromoRepublic’s Quotes Category for free. This social media content builder provides 50+ industries with pre-made visual posts templates for 6+ categories from engaging content to promotions, trends to local events and more.
Memes are images that contain some contextual meanings and propagate over time as they are shared and customized by the community. These should be used carefully, so consider your audience. When used effectively, they can add some humor to your posts and appeal to younger followers. The risk with memes is that they often have built-in contexts that can be misinterpreted or misunderstood by a broader readership. However, when used effectively memes can be more compelling that simple images and can inspire an added feeling of community through inside jokes or recurring themes.
Animated gifs can be used when a short piece of animation would be helpful. They offer a bit more depth than static images, and require significantly less time and bandwidth than watching a full video.
Screenshots are useful when providing instructions to your audience. When learning new techniques or how to use new software, selected screenshots can save them a lot of time searching for options. Most modern devices include a screenshot application, but online tools such as Skitch are also available.
- VIDEOS
Videos can combine the capability of images, text, and audio. In this way, they can be quite flexible. They can be used to convey anything from instructions on how to perform a task to testimonials from satisfied customers. While this medium can be very time-consuming, and potentially costly, the impact of having a quality video in a post can be significant. After watching a video, 64% of customers were more likely to purchase a product.
Considering that the average lifespan of a video is about four years, this medium has significant staying power. It is important that any video that you invest your time and money into should be coherent with any other media that you may also post as well as your overall brand image. Moz recently published a study that claims that posts containing videos generate nearly 300% more inbound traffic.
- INTERACTIVE CONTENT
Another approach to enhance reader engagement is to provide them with interactive content. Questions or quizzes can rapidly pull your readers in and get them invested in your brand. It is best to avoid ‘yes or no’ questions; instead focus on questions with greater depth to get your audience thinking.
Calls to action (CTAs) can also be a useful approach. These are short statements, often at the end of content pieces that are meant to inspire the audience to interact further. They can range from ‘follow us!’ to links to other content like ‘watch this clip!’ When used properly, CTAs should inspire urgency.
- INFOGRAPHICS
Infographics combine images with data and statistics. This presentation method can be useful for expressing facts along with a relevant image or graphs. Your audience will then be more likely to make associations within the presented content where they might not with simple tables of numbers or individual graphs. This medium allows for non-experts to easily digest complicated facts.
There are many variables that will determine how effective an infographic is for your purposes. Things as mundane as choice of colors and fonts can significantly impact the reaction to an infographic.
High-quality infographics tend to be widely shared on social media, so this could be a vehicle for increasing brand awareness quickly. An effective approach when sharing infographics is to include a thumbnail and a hyperlink to your original content. This will avoid size restrictions as well as channeling traffic to your site.
- PRESENTATIONS
While presentations function similarly to infographics, they are better suited for delivering information sequentially. Once part of the realm of stuffy overhead slideshows, presentations are no longer limited to in-person meetings. Slide-based presentations have become significantly more sophisticated than simple lists of bullet points. Services like SlideShare allow a much greater reach across various platforms.
Effective presentations should make good use of color and multimedia content. Inconsistency in a presentation can be seriously distracting, so try to make things as uniform as possible. When presenting data, it is best to cite the best sources so make sure to check their validity.
GETTING THE MOST OUT OF VISUAL CONTENT
Visual content engages your audience in ways that text cannot. These approaches may be just the thing you need to set your brand apart from your competitors. Well-designed content will deepen the engagement of the audience and provide a real connection between customers and products. There is always some risk involved in visual presentation, and that is mainly encountered when the content is poorly designed or boring. This type of content will at best take up page space, or worse, alienate potential customers. Substance will always drive any visual content, but presentation style is what sets ‘good’ apart from ‘great.’
CREATE GREAT VISUAL CONTENT WITH PROMOREPUBLIC
PromoRepublic has all the tools you need to create, in some cases, the posts themselves, and in other cases like video and presentations, the elements you need. With a library of images, pre-made professional templates and a drag-and-drop editor that’s native to the software, you can’t go wrong. If visual content is your priority, PromoRepublic is your resource. Plus, you can schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, view your analytics and more. Readers of this blog are encouraged to try PromoRepublic for free. Don’t let your visual game lag.
