Visual Social Media: How Images Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Do you use visuals in your social media marketing?

Are you wondering how you can use images to take your marketing to a whole new level?

To learn about visual social media, I interview Donna Moritz for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Donna Moritz, who is a social media and visual marketing expert. She's also the founder of Socially Sorted, a blog designed to help small businesses achieve more with visual social media.

Donna shares the importance of visuals in your social media marketing.

You'll discover the types of images that work best and the tools you can use to create them.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Visual Social Media
What is visual social media marketing?

Donna sees it as the use of some kind of imagery to communicate visually. You can use images or video to tell a story or share a message. This has been done in marketing for years.

As humans, it's in our nature to communicate visually. Images process quickly and people are drawn to them.

Listen to the show to find out why visual marketing has merged with social media.

Why do visuals matter so much?

Donna explains how most people started out with a blog, where they would write in long form and build a community around it. Then along came Facebook, where posts became shorter and then Twitter burst onto the scene with a 140-character limit.

People have moved from blogs to microblogs and now to multimedia microblogs. The only direction to go is to communicate with pictures. With Instagram and Pinterest, you can communicate purely with images. Sometimes words aren't even necessary.

Images have become even more popular with the ability to take photos and video with the camera on a smartphone.

Detavio Samuels, who owns the marketing business Global Hue, said, "The only thing shorter than a tweet or a post is a picture."

Listen to the show to find out why all platforms are becoming image-centric.

Image options for marketers

Donna explains how you can use images in different ways in your marketing.

You can make a short, snappy video; use images and graphics; slides or a SlideShare presentation; infographics and text-based images.

You'll find out which one from the list below Donna discovered gets the most shares and responses.

Tips
How-to
Quotes
Checklists
Infographics

Jay Baer talks about being inherently useful in his book Youtility. If you want your image to be shared a lot, then you have to make sure it's helpful to your target audience.

You have to remember that as humans, we connect emotionally to images more than video, audio or text. People make decisions and take action quicker when prompted by images, rather than by reading a lot of text.

You'll find out how you can use how-to images for your business and why it's easier than you think.

Another great option is to tease people with a graphic. You don't have to provide the whole procedure; instead add a call to action to get people to click through to your blog, Facebook page or Pinterest page.

On Facebook, you want to build engagement, so the image should be one that people will share, rather than click through to your blog. If you are clever, you can get some really great results.

Listen to the show to learn why people feel compelled to click on an image, like it, share it, repost it or save it.

The elements of good visuals and what makes them sharable

Donna says that with any piece of content,