7 ways images can drive social media engagement
Visuals stimulate the viewer’s eye, mind, and emotions more quickly and deeply than simple text does. Here’s guidance for knowing how best to engage your audience with images.
Do you want to know how to get more social media followers, shares, “likes,” and media exposure, and even improve your search engine rankings?
The answer is images.
Not just any image or visual, but something attractive, relevant, compelling, and, of course, properly optimized.
I became a visual evangelist after experiencing the power of images on my PR in Your Pajamas Facebook page. We usually get a handful of “likes” and shares on our updates, but guess what happened when I posted an image with a quote. It got 121 “likes,” three comments, and 63 shares.
This wasn’t a fluke, either. According to Hubspot, Facebook photos get 53 percent more “likes” than regular, text-based posts.
It makes sense. Pictures are more eye-grabbing and interesting than words on a screen. We can grasp an image’s meaning faster than we can read sentences, so visuals can be a shortcut to communication. Perhaps most important, images stimulate emotions much more effectively and quickly than words. This probably explains why pictures compel us to take action more readily than text does.
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