an-eye-for-engagement-making-your-content-highly-visualSome of the most powerful and persuasive websites achieve their success by employing smart strategies such as making their content highly visual.

As someone like alexmiller.com will tell you, you have to take advantage of a variety of online marketing techniques in order to get yourself noticed, which includes using images and video in order to bring your website content to life.

Encouraging sharing

Images are not just an integral part of what the internet is about, they are the DNA and the blueprint to what makes a website attractive and interesting to visitors.

There is a plausible scientific reason behind why images are important on your website, as it seems we are wired to process visual information at a faster rate than text and from a marketing perspective, people like to share images via social media.

There are numerous studies which all point strongly to the same conclusion, which is that people are far more likely to share image-based content than something text-based.

An analysis of a sample of Facebook users would suggest that of all shared posts amongst those reviewed, about 85% were photos, which is a compelling argument towards ensuring that you provide plenty of highly visual content on your website.

Engaging your audience

It shouldn’t take much persuasion when you look at the figures, to accept that there is definitely a case for providing plenty of visual content on your website, as it certainly drives more engagement from your online audience.

An article that contains an image or video content has the potential to generate almost twice as many views than a similar article without any visual content to support the text.

So the question is, what are some of the best ways of engaging your audience and getting them to interact and share with others?

Liven up your tweets

If you are using twitter and maybe feel that some of your tweets are not really hitting the mark because they are a bit dull in appearance, consider using Twitter cards.

You can choose from a number of different Twitter cards available to add some images to your words of wisdom and if you get it right, you can generate as much as 200% more retweets when you use images to bring your tweet to life.

Quality images

Whether you are using images for your website, Tweets or Facebook posts, the same rules apply, you have to make every effort to source the right image and try to be as unique as possible.

Stock photos are often highly relevant and normally of great quality because they have been professionally staged and taken, but they are unlikely to have the same impact if you simply use an image that has been seen somewhere else and can be found across a number of different social media sites and websites.

Sites like deathtothestockphoto.com and others like it can be a source of inspiration with some copyright free photos and if you do subscribe to one of the big stock photo sites like Shutterstock for example, try to choose underused photos for originality, by using their undiscovered tab on that site and similar options on other sites.

It is always good if you can use your own relevant images that have been created by yourself as this is normally well received by your audience, but at least try to be a bit different if you do want to use stock images and want those retweets to happen.

A pin for every blog post

If you can get the settings on your blog adjusted correctly, you should be able to create a situation where every blog’s header image is seamlessly added to Pinterest as a pin.

Pinterest is understandably popular as it is a good resource for content curation and for just generally browsing as part of researching an idea or a subject. It should be reasonably simple to create a board for each topic that you wish to cover and then just start pinning so that you generate some more website traffic using images.

Take advantage of GIFs

GIF’s are easy to create and they work well on web pages, plus you can use them on social media sites and in emails too.

Animated GIFs are an excellent way of presenting product tutorials and walk-throughs and will be a good way of bring a product to life on your website. You may have to use some file compression techniques for animated GIF’s, but for what you might get in return, they are worth the effort.

When you look at the uplift in interest generated by using images, there is a big incentive to make your content highly visual and as appealing as possible to your audience.

Author

Nicole Frost works in marketing and has a background in graphic design. She loves creative jobs and is building up her experience working with clients on their social media campaigns.