Attention is something very hard to grab and once you have managed to hold onto it, the clock is ticking as to how long you can keep someone interested. And as winning over attention is the name of the game when it comes to planning a successful social media strategy, your best bet is to look into what works best.

Fast-moving and constantly changing, the social media arena needs players who are up-to-date and put their know-how to work. So with that said, we know that 90 per cent of information communicated to our brains is visual and visual content is processed 60,000 times faster than text. Think about that for a moment and consider how pictures, videos, and cleverly designed fonts could all boost your social media results.

Now, if you want to let smooth-talking visual content do all the heavy, marketing, lifting for you, then you should get familiar with the reasons why pictures speak louder than words.

Attention

Visual story-telling material is powerful and can easily attract attention. With pictures or videos, the effort you put behind your social media presence is minimum, but the impact of letting your company or product have a social media voice in the visual sense is great.

Action

A good online visual campaign says exactly what you want it to say and is straightforward. Pictures and videos can be understood in milliseconds, they can be liked and shared over and over again, increasing your followers, consumers and – the ultimate goal – your revenue.

Tip: don’t just stick to photos, for example, go all out with videos, printed posts, infographics, memes, presentations, and screenshots. Keep followers interested and be sure that they will come back for more.
Relevance

Good marketers know their markets, their customers and the current trends. If the visual images you put out there spark the interest of the follower because it speaks to their personal wants and likes, then they will definitely be noticed and remembered. You want your followers to remember what they saw so they can tell their friends. Remembering information happens better with visuals as only ten per cent of what we hear is normally remembered three days later, while 65 per cent of the information given by relevant images will be in our recollection after three days. So that gives your followers ample time to spread the word.

Hint: relevance is not only what a follower likes and wants, it can also be relevant to an upcoming event or to a holiday. If there is a premier of a blockbuster movie coming up, for example, and the theme of the movie fits your brand perfectly, then create visual content that can go with that flow.

Sharing

When it comes to visuals, they don’t all have to come from you – why should a company have all the fun? Social media works so well because it uses one of our most primitive instincts: socialisation. And what is socialisation anyway, isn’t it just a way for us to share our feelings, experiences and desires? So if we all instinctively want to share then giving your followers the platform to share with like-minded people will expand their social circle and your fan base.

How to: it is simple really, say you are a hotel and give followers the chance to share pictures of themselves while at your hotel, relaxing and having a great time. Their friends will see the picture, like it, look into where their friends were staying and there you go, you have a new fan.

We are visual creatures, we like to socialise and we like to share. Long-winded texts, how-to guides and product descriptions used to do the trick of capturing market share, but now the world of social media has picked up on the fact that pictures do actually speak volumes without much fuss.

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