How to fire up your social visual communication

Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan’s distance-learning portal RaganTraining.com. The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations, and interactive courses.

Many communicators—among them consultant Shel Holtz—were educated as journalists and writers. Tell a story with text? Sure, they’re great at that.

Hire a photog to add some splash to an annual report? Why not? That’s in the budget.

But ask many of these wordsmiths to tell a story in one image—no text—and it’s beyond their experience. “Yet increasingly, that’s the kind of thing that works in the digital and social space,” Holtz says in a Ragan Training video, “Social visual communication.”

For those who love storytelling but can’t imagine doing it in a single frame or a six-second Vine video, Holtz offers ideas on how organizations are using images to boost their message.