If there is one thing you should try to do to increase the impact of your social media, it’s adding visual marketing to your posts. At the simplest level, that means that every post should contain a graphic or video. While that sounds like a lot of work, it can have a huge payoff — this tactic has helped us double the impact of our posts.
For most marketers just getting started with visual content creation, putting visuals in every single post feels near impossible. That’s where this post comes in — the purpose of this article is to explain the best (and often easiest) tips for adding visuals to your social media posts.
1) Maximize Twitter’s Images
Some people still think that tweets are merely 140 characters of text. They are wrong — Twitter is a powerful visual-marketing platform too. In fact, one of our A/B tests found that tweets with images get 55% more leads.
There are several ways to maximize your Twitter content with visuals. First, you can add an image to your tweets. This alone might double the impact of your tweets.
It’s hard to write good. Er, um, well. Grab this guide & learn to write better marketing copy: http://t.co/1hFKjuZt2n pic.twitter.com/Cpe1EF6yrp
— HubSpot (@HubSpot)
November 14, 2014
Second, you can add up to four images to a tweet, so why stop at one. This is a great way to showcase an event or to tell a story that would be difficult with one picture. Here’s an example of a tweet with four images that received some good retweets and favorites.
“@GuyKawasaki: Have you tried tweeting with four images? It’s pretty cool! #TwitterTips pic.twitter.com/v5whJSAnK8” .@Lupita_Nyongo
— Michael Onyango (@miconyango)
October 22, 2014
Third, you can also embed your tweets into blog posts like this and get more tweets and favorites. The above images are interactive within this post because they’re embedded tweets.
2) Embrace Pinterest
If you’re trying to cultivate an audience on Pinterest or you already have one there, every blog post needs an image that readers can “pin” to Pinterest. The ideal size for Pinterest images is 735 pixels x 1102 pixels for a vertical image or 735 pixels by 735 pixels for a square image. 735 pixels is the maximum width of a Pinterest post and 1102 pixels is the perfect length for an image — anything longer is truncated with a “read more” link.
Also, when you create a Pinterest image, you can embed the pin in the blog post so your readers can repin your perfectly formatted pin.
3) Make Photo Albums
Going beyond a single graphic or up to four on Twitter, you can create albums on Facebook and Google+ that can contain hundreds of photos. These albums are perfect for large events such as conferences and parties. The more pictures you post, the more likely people will see themselves or someone they recognize. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of them commenting and re-sharing the pictures with others.
4) Use Flipagrams
Much as we love albums as a way to get organized, we’ve seen that few people will click through an entire collection. You could break albums into smaller collections, but that probably won’t get much more viewership.
One solution to this problem is Flipagram — it’s a fun app that you can use to create videos from still photos and share on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s available for iOS, Android, and Windows.
On Flipagram, there’s a host of free thirty-second audio clips to add music to your videos, or you can add music from your own library. Peg used Flipagram to record a trip to a client’s retail location, Rent the Runway in Las Vegas. As an alternative to a photo album, which might not get many views, this slideshow of pictures was created with the images in her phone’s camera roll.
