Top Ways to Improve your Social Media in 2014

Have you ever heard the saying; a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, it’s true. When was the last time that you logged onto a website to find that there were no pictures, only words, and got really excited about it? Can’t remember? Neither can anyone else. Pictures and visual content are vital for engaging content. If you are not adding visual elements to your website, social media posts or marketing pieces, you could be falling short of your own potential and missing out on likely customers or followers. Recent trends in social media indicate that marketers plan on using more infographics, pictures or memes in social media marketing in 2014. Images on social media get more engagement than links or text. Visual content can improve a brand’s marketing objectives by generating customer interest and encouraging consumer engagement or spending. Pictures also allow consumers to comprehend more content in a shorter amount of time. Integrating visual content into social media efforts can result in lead generation, referral traffic and revenue for businesses. Therefore, it is crucial to keep up with the trends in social media, especially using visual content.

In order to keep up with this trend, brands and marketers will have to find new ways to catch the attention of consumers with visual content such as: graphic advertisements, images, infographics, videos and striking banners. In 2014, brands will need to utilize video platforms such as Vine or Instagram in their social media marketing strategy to tell their story and draw traffic to their sites. Another aspect of businesses using photos is that they need to be ‘sharable’ across all platforms to derive a benefit of marketing efforts. When you do post product or brand pictures on networks like Pinterest or Instagram, allowing others to use your images in exchange for a link back to your site will boost traffic and sales. Businesses should not be afraid to share photos of their team in action. Finally, marketers and brands will need to be conscious of their sites and web content being mobile friendly as more and more people are accessing sites on their smart phones versus a computer. Other ways to incorporate visual content into social media include images in blog posts, real-time photo sharing, YouTube or even memes. As an example of the power of pictures, consider that Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram each gained over 10 million visitors in 2012, thanks to eye-catching
content. Numbers from Statista numbers shared on Mediabistro show that users spend more time on Pinterest (1:17 minutes) or Tumblr (1:38 minutes) than on Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google+ combined (Redsicker, 2014).