Social media posts that include visual elements are inherently more engaging than those that don’t.
If you’re looking for ways to drive more customer interaction with your social accounts, we’ve found three ways that you can up your visual game.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to be on every network to achieve results. Based on your type of business, decide which channels are right for you and go from there!
Infographics and Flow Charts
Due to their popularity, infographics are some of the most shareable content on the Web. Their clever cartoon figures and rapidly digestible graphs and charts harness the largely visual nature of digital interaction. This is useful for spreading information and building awareness about your business, since the majority of the population learns visually.
While it certainly adds value to your social accounts for you to share others’ infographics, why not go a step further and make your own?
Social Media Examiner has a helpful guide that shows you how to identify a good topic, gather reliable information, parcel it out into sections, and get it promoted. The more people you have sharing your infographic (which should have your online contact info at the bottom), the more traffic you can drive back to your web presence. Online generators like Infogram can help you get started.
Another value-adding informational medium is the flow chart, which you can create using Microsoft Office or a program such as draw.io.
Flow charts are great for giving your customers a guided thought process about how to use or purchase your products and services. It is extremely easy for these charts to get complex and muddled, especially if more and more ideas start cropping up. Nevertheless, a flowchart that answers questions with a crisp design to boot is a surefire way to get people interacting. Be sure and use it in a blog post so people can comment!
Images in Posts
You need images in your posts. Not necessarily for every single blog entry or tweet; that might be a little overwhelming. But with all the statistics that show how much more engagement posts with images get, more than half of your posts should probably have a visual supplement. They don’t have to be fancy or under an exclusive license. You can find hundreds of royalty-free images through Creative Commons, Compfight, and Pixabay, to name a few. All these should cost you is the space needed to credit the original photographer or artist (and some don’t even require that).
Once your site’s articles are snazzily accessorized with their very own leading image, posting them to your business’s social media accounts will be a breeze, since the main picture of a webpage usually shows up in its link preview (though you will need to attach an image separately in a tweet). The same applies to others’ articles that you choose to share. Jeff Bullas, in his reflections on the early days of Instagram (back when people still put the word “app” in quotes), uses an infographic to explain why visuals are so important. His points — that pictures increase page views, heighten trust in a product, strengthen the reader’s connection to the material — still hold true today.
If you’re going to use imagery to take your posts from good to great, be sure you know what resources are at your disposal. Buffer’s guide to awesome visual content provides a wealth of statistics on why photos are important (in case you still weren’t convinced). It also demonstrates how to evaluate the mathematical aesthetics of a picture you want to use, pick the right content for your post, and tweak it until it’s just right. Follow their tips and you’ll probably be having way more fun than you should be allowed while working.
Optimized Image Dimensions for Avatars and Headers
The simplest rule of thumb is “the higher the resolution, the better.” However, there’s more to picking the right image size than that. Your business’s social channels don’t look very professional when caught unprepared after a network updates its header size, or if different devices show different amounts of the image. That’s why we’re thankful for tools like this guide to social media image dimensions. That one covers headers for almost all the major social networks, and squeezes in a few helpful hints about the size of the pictures in your feed as well.
Many blogging platforms, like WordPress and Tumblr, have varying header sizes depending on the theme you choose. Make some time to test out a few options until you find one that looks good. If you’re having trouble, contact the theme developer for sizing recommendations.
As with the individual posts, you can find free images online to use as your header, or you could make your own. (It’s a good idea to hire a designer to do this if you don’t have much experience in graphic design.) If you’re going the custom route, make sure you take into account your branding and content goals along with the image size.
Got any other tips for us on optimizing your web presence with images? Share your thoughts below!
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1DXPRL8 via mobile responsive web design
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1aM5kjX
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