Visual content, more than any other medium, draws people in. Images drive interactions across all social platforms including LinkedIn and Twitter. Social networks highlight visual content.
Using visual content doesn’t need special skills. If your goal is to integrate visual content into your social marketing plan, traffic-driving images are within your reach. Here’s the five essential elements:
1. Supplying What Your Audience Needs
Images must appeal to your target audience to encourage engagement and information shares. Appealing and shareable images must give advice that is short and instantly actionable. By creating how-to images and using Instagram for sharing across social media platforms, your blog traffic increases and your posts have increased engagement.
Don’t forget quotes! On any social platform, quotes are one of the most shareable types of image. If you decide to go this route, focus on being inspiring or helpful to get the most engagement. For original picture quotes, check out Curated Quotes. Their quotes are free as long as you credit them.
2. Creating Original Art
Because every day we are flooded with information, anything new stands out. This is true on any platform and at any time. So why not create your own images?
When you create original images, you don’t have to worry about copyright infringement. You own the images to use in any way at any time. You also don’t have to worry about the legal fine print that accompanies stock photos. If you’re using Google images, don’t—Google is not a stock library.
In short, join the 20% of people who make original art content for other people to share.
3. Being Quick and Consistent
A consistent approach to sharing images is a smart social media marketing tactic. Here, you can start by simply posting an image at the same time each day. As you increase your output, post at the same time each day.
Creating your own images, of course, takes time. You can speed up the process by using widely available online tools. Also, learn to create images in batches.
4. Optimizing Brand, Source, and Size
Optimization is the most important step when creating images. Always think about branding, source information, and size. This not only helps with the platform or platforms you are posting to, it also helps your images get noticed and shared. This, in turn, sends traffic back to your website.
What size is best for your image? Considering how you plan to use your image and where you plan to post it can help you decide.
5. An Obvious Call to Action is Necessary
There is a lot of competition for your ideal audience on any social platform or in any news feed. Family and friends, people with funny photos, big brands and small businesses are all competition.
Even if your images catch your target audience’s attention, where do you go from there? If you don’t know what your fans want to do with your image, your fans won’t know either.
You have a goal of getting comments, likes, or, best of all, clicks and sharing, which is the most important part of social marketing. However, to earn those shares, you must have an explicit call to action.
To sum up, the key to creating engaging social media content is shareable images. Just take these five steps:
1) Use images that speak to your audience.
2) Create original art.
3) Design a quick and easy way to make images in batches, and then post your images at the same time each day.
4) Use some of the available tools for creating a template to reinforce your brand. At the same time, consider the platform in choosing a size for any particular image.
5) Include a strong call to action when posting an image.
For good interaction, all networks need compelling images. By planning and putting forth the effort, you’ll shortly see more website traffic and higher engagement.
Photo by Needle & Awl.
Sandra Miller is a professional writer from New York. Writes her first book and learns the art of self publishing. She has a PhD in English literature, NYU graduate.