There is no question that our words make the perfect content for social media, search engine optimization and other online campaigns.

But even when online, the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words still holds true. It’s because of this that the most popular services right now are image-based, such as Instagram and Pinterest. Images are being used for social media marketing more than ever. Here’s why:

Images Make Data Easier to Digest

“A 40% growth”, “2 out of 5″, “78%”, numbers like these are common to almost every article that relates to some study or other. But most people find it tedious to read an article that has a lot of numbers. To drive home a point when it comes to statistics and data, use images. Take a look at infographics for example. Infographics present numerical data and statistics in graphic form, making it both interesting and easier to understand.

Infographics can also help you strengthen your brand. If you want to convey a fun image, you can use the same characteristic for your infographic. You can also include your logos, fonts, and colors to help give your infographic your own corporate look.

Tips and best practices:

  • The best way to produce infographics is to do it in-house or with the help of design professionals. But if the budget is limited, there are several online services such as Piktochart that can help you. These services offer you a lot of design capabilities so that you could create an infographic even if you can’t draw a line.
  • Put the word infographic in the title of your blog post. This will help people know that an infographic is included in the post, and is especially useful when the post is shared on Facebook and Twitter.
  • Put some thought into the graphical elements that you use to create your infographics. Much more than simply pie charts and graphs, your infographic should condense pages and pages of data into a single image that people can easily digest and understand.
  • Extend the life of your data by creating several related infographics. For example, if you have a study on social media use by marketers, then create one infographic for the whole study’s findings. Then create another for data related to Twitter, then another for Facebook, and so on. This will help you get more out of your data and enables you to target each subset of users in the general study.

Drive More Engagement with Photos

Like it or not, social media users are not fond of heavy reading. Twitter has capped the maximum number of characters to 140, while Facebook stories are much more effective in engaging users when you have a short and concise update composed of 80 characters.

So instead of boring your connections on social media, why not use photos or videos instead. In fact, Facebook has already activated its timeline layout, which gives more emphasis and screen real estate to updates that include pictures, images and videos.

What’s more important is that images and videos tend to attract attention better than text. In fact, a blog post is more widely read if it has photos accompanying the posts.

For some services such as Instagram, photos are the main ways to engage your connections. So, without images, you are simply missing out on being on these services.

Let Your Customer Collect and Curate Images

People are devouring images online. Take for instance the Pinterest phenomenon. Accumulating over 10 million users in just months, Pinterest now drives more traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined. There are two things that people can do on Pinterest: curate and collect images. They look for images to pin on their boards, while also collecting images that others share.

Curating and collecting are actually nothing new on the World Wide Web. Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us started the trend long ago. The only difference is that social bookmarking sites deal with links and website URLs, while Pinterest deals with images.

Services like Pinterest allow you to feel like you are window shopping in the mall so you are encouraged to check out the images there.

If you do not make the effort to create images that your users can curate or collect, you’re missing out on a lot of social recommendations and the opportunity to be shared on your customer’s social media properties.

Get Ranked With Your Images

Especially for very competitive keywords, your images may help you gain some traffic by being included in Google’s Image search.

The good news is that it is very easy to optimize images and rank well on Image search. So, while you may end up in the second or third pages of Google’s Web Search, your image may be included in the first two rows on Google Image Search.

This post is brought to you by SEO Inc. Pictures do say a thousand words but make sure they are saying all the right things! Properly planned and placed images can be a boon to your Social Media Marketing initiative.

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