Visuals are very crucial for every business to stand out in the rat race of social media marketing. According to an interesting infographics, YouTube has 4 billion views everyday. Instagram surpasses Twitter for daily active mobile users. Images on Facebook get 53% more engagement than those without. A Buffer App blog confirmed that tweets with images get higher engagement compared to their no-image counterparts.
So in a nutshell, to sustain in the competition on social media, you need more and more images. But everybody is doing it. Not all of them are successful in their efforts. How to avoid the mistakes that everyone is doing? Here are the answers.
Build a brand identity:
Do your images talk about your brand? This is the most fatal mistake a brand could do on social media. Creating images without brand identity is like creating random visuals here and there. People will see them, like them and forget about them. There will be no brand awareness or brand recall.
Look at the image taken from Adidas’s Instagram feed. It not only creates a brand identity, but also leaves multiple brand footprints. The best way to do the latter is, showcasing your products and adding logo. Also try to bring in the emotion and voice that your brand is preaching.
SEO for images:
Images are equally important for search engine optimization. Have you heard of anything called “Image optimization”? When people search for you or something related to your service or products, search engines return some results. If you don’t pay attention in optimizing your image for such searches, chances are that your images will not work for you.
In order to be ensure your search engine friendliness, you need to add the right meta-title and description for every image of your site or blog. This is the only way to rank on the high-ranking images searches.
Create images to outshine:
Each day businesses are creating loads of images. How would you be different than others? There is only one solution. You need to create images that your fans can’t ignore. But for that, you need great concepts and a strong design team.
Remember, you don’t need to create in galore to succeed. Just create in a smarter way. Quantity is not important when you offer quality. Social media audience always recognizes good work rather than boring stuff again and again. Moreover, followed by Facebook’s decreased organic reach, there is a huge competition to reign on your fans’ timeline. Use the scope strategically.
Maintain image hygiene:
Every social network has a specified space allotted for images. For example, the ideal Facebook newsfeed image size is 1,200 x 628.
Instagram image is squarish. Pinterest images should be more taller rather than wider. If you cannot utilize the full size, provided, your images can be considered as poor quality.
Image: Buffer App
Here is a cheat sheet for all the major social networks. If you are present on more than one network, you should ideally create different sizes for one image. This would reduce your time as well as help you reuse one content again and again.
Tell a story:
Social media audience connects with storytelling more than anything else. No matter what your product or service is, if you can create an emotional connection with your audience, your visuals would surely take you places.
For example, this Instagram image from Wedding Ideas Brides perfectly created an emotional experience for its target audience. If you analyze the image closely, it’s a simple image built on a simple concept, but this eternal moment would take many people through a deja vu, which cannot be expressed in words.
Don’t include too much text:
Too much of text may ruin your user experience on social media. You might say that text is needed to deliver the right message at the right moment, however, if you are creative enough, you can deal with the problem easily.
This is an upcoming event image of Housing.com. If you look closely, you will identify a brand recall and emotional connect with the audience and that too without any text. But we are not saying that text on images are strict no-no. If you have to include any, try not to exceed 20% of the image.
