/Originally posted on Medium.
Once you witness the power of images on Social Media, you’ll never look back. Platforms like Instagram may be specifically designed for the sharing of high quality images, but that doesn’t mean your other Social Media channels should be limited to text-only posts. According to Buffer, tweets with images receive 150% more re-tweets than tweets without images. On Facebook, posts that include images make up nearly 80% of shared content.
The benefits are clear.
Unfortunately many small businesses get stuck posting text updates, and the only time an image gets posted, is when a for-print flyer gets placed (read: dumped) on social media channels. This is a wasted opportunity.
Consider how you’re able to visually represent what it is that you do. This is not as hard as it initially seems. A good start is to split your visual content into two main categories:
- Hard to Understand
List all the concepts within your business that are hard to understand, Normally these concepts would require paragraphs of text to explain. Typically the output image here would be an info-graphic. Using a financial services company as an example, it may be easier to explain a complex financial concept as a graph, rather than a paragraph. For a fast food chain, it could be a flow diagram showing how your meals are prepared. - Nice to Look At
This one may seem obvious, but the trick is to see the beauty in everything (no, really). Your company may be manufacturing ball bearings, but there are dozens of creative possibilities: extreme close-ups of the shiny metal bearings; a low-angle hero shot of the machine making them; or more interestingly, images showing ball-bearings being used in everyday life — think fidget spinners!
Your images need to be relevant and look professional. Most modern smartphones able to take professional looking images, and your followers are used to seeing good images.
Quality is important, so make sure your camera does justice to the quality of your product.
And still images are just the start. With trends showing that video will comprise 80% of all internet traffic by 2020, your journey to video starts with still images….
> Engage, Grow, Repeat >