Content plays the pivotal role to stimulate online growth and engage your audience. Well written text content will always be an integral part of marketing but, here’s the deal:
“The secret to succeeding in a content marketing campaign is to create incredible visual content to set yourself apart in the digital era.”
The mergence of media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, and Snapchat, that are based on visual content, has influenced more brands and companies to jump into the visual content marketing game than ever.
Adding a mix of visual content to your content marketing campaign can improve your social media results. By following these rules in this blog you will be able to drive interest and clicks on your social posts, keep your audience interested, spark engagement and create relevancy to your audience.
Here are 7 rules to create enthralling visual content for social media:
1. Leverage Images To Speak Louder Than Text
Look:
Most brands spend a good amount of time on writing great content on the website.
Sure, that’s great, but not willing to spend resources on a photoshoot, stock images or working with a graphic designer to create appealing image designs can be a major drawback.
The use of photos to communicate on social media is powerful on its own which is useful considering 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
If we have a well-planned stock of images to post on social media, most of our job is done. Following which we need to keep generating image content based on what is working and what’s not to fuel our social media engines.
Now: Let’s look at some examples of image content from some popular sites.
Image content with a well-written text to support the images helps to get more clicks and drive the interest of the user.
Use a good mix of image content to sustain viewers interest. Target does a good job on social media by posting recipes, discounts, sale alerts and more. 
2. Choose Videos To Tell Your Story
Right from product information videos to just fun interactive videos, though they take more effort, it is worth the time and money to create them.
When we talk about video content there are two main social media platforms for online video marketing:
First, with its billion users, Youtube has been the leading video distribution platform. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day.
Second, catching up quickly is Facebook with second largest referral source for online videos. Facebook gets 8 billion daily video views which is more than Youtube, so it is better to upload a native video to Facebook than a video share from Youtube.
The Facebook video views crossed that of Youtube in 2014 when they applied the autoplay feature in Facebook to boost video views.
So much can be done over video, making it a very flexible for marketers to experiment with their product and branding.
“Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time.” – Robert Weiss
Isn’t that great: Being able to save the time of your audience and being able to put across the message of your brand. That’s what makes video marketing so powerful and effective.
Videos are a great medium to showcase your brand and tell your audience about the brand in a short time.
3. Engage With Infographics Over Plain Text
The marketing industry seems to have a love-hate relationship with infographics. When they are done well infographics helps you convert a lot of complex information in a way that’s easier to digest.
Want to know the best part?
Your SEO strategy can benefit from infographics.
How?
- By building links - not only good for capturing the attention on the web but when also grabbing attention and earning links and traffic when people feature your infographic.
- By sharing - infographics are not only easy to digest and understand but also can be shared on social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, Reddit and more.
- By branding - create a great infographic and it could go viral. You could add your company logo to the infographic without being obstructive.
Infographics have played an important role in SEO, especially when it comes to building links.
4. Entertain With GIFs
Similar to video content, GIF or Graphics Interchange Format image can be used to tell a small message which can be looped to play infinite times.
GIFs can actually be used in a very flexible way. You can especially craft a special occasion message in a GIF, say for example you want to wish your followers “Merry Christmas”
Similarly, memes can be used to express feelings of joy, anger or hope depending on what is your message to the audience.
5. Express Yourself With Memes
Often times in our social media marketing plan we have to bring in some fun element to trigger the emotions of customers. Doing so will help to connect with them on an emotional level and build a loyal fan following.
Memes are a great visual content to add to your social media marketing. It will make your fun and interesting for the audience. They are easy and flexible to create, can be used in a number of different ways.
Take your image content to a new level by including memes into your social media marketing. Memes are known as images accompanied with humorous text.
Memes are great way to express a feeling and bring out positive emotions. Below are few examples on how to use memes in different places:
Day based meme:
Fitness based meme:
Education based meme:
6. Captivate With Presentations
Similar to infographics, presentations can be used to present information in a visually appealing manner when your content is too long to be included in an infographic.
With websites like slideshare, you can share your presentation in the world wide web. A well designed slideshare presentation can help you communicate with your customers effectively.
You might be wondering: Presentations should be limited to board rooms as they are boring and time consuming. No not really! Rand Fiskin’s presentation on making presentation better not only keeps the user engaged till the very end but it is also fun, interactive to go through.
And the best part is:
You do not need to be present in person for your presentation but also make sure that the presentation is captivating and self-explanatory on it’s own. Once uploaded you will be able to share your presentation on your social media channels for promotion or even include it in your blog for more visibility.
7. Use Screenshots To Validate
Screenshots are great to provide a glimpse of the inner workings of your product or service and being able to highlight to the certain key features of your product.
Now:
Screenshots can be used in a number of ways. We will discuss a couple of ways here:
- In backup claims - It can be used to backing up claims you make in your sales copy. For example sharing a screenshot of the certain capability of your product can convince a buyer.
- In trust building - It can be used to share customers reviews from industry forums and social media on your product or service.
A recent study found that 88% of customers were influenced by an online customer service review when making a buying decision. - In Infographics and presentations - include screenshots to make your infographics more meaningful supporting the stats.
- In comments - you can also capture a screenshot of the comments section of a happy customer and share in to your social media channel.
Screenshots can be used in a number of other ways including in you blog to include screenshots from your social media post or vice versa.
Conclusion:
Humans are visual beings and visual communication is the most sought after medium for communication in the digital era. With the rise of social networks, more and more people are jumping onto social media to stay connected with friends and family.
From young adults among the earliest social media adopters to older adults, the number of social network users worldwide has increased in recent years. This provides an excellent opportunity for businesses to reach out to potential customers online.
But here’s the kicker: According to the portal for statistics, Statista, it is estimated that there will be around 2.67 billion social media users around the globe, up from 1.91 billion in 2014. 
With this promising penetration of social networking in our lives, social media is nowhere to disappear from our lives.
What’s The Bottom Line?
Whether you are a businessman looking to build a personal brand, or a startup on a limited marketing budget to reach your desired audience, a correct mix of visual content with great text content will help you stand out from the crowd and get you the attention needed.
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* Adapted lead image: 
Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com
Source: Search Engine People