Social media marketing is an increasingly popular tool used by marketers across all kinds of different industries. In the digital age, consumers expect businesses to have a social media presence and as such, around 94% of marketers now use Facebook.
The problem is that the online marketplace is becoming more and more saturated. It is one thing to be present online, but another to be visible to your target audience. Because of this, businesses need to find ways to stand out amongst the competition. When it comes to social media, visual content is the key to improving engagement. Read on to find out why images are so critical to your social media marketing strategy.
Firstly, it is important to understand a little about human behaviour. Nowadays, with the immediacy of online content, people have much shorter attention spans. Due to this, your target market probably won’t be interested in reading lengthy posts. Without any images, it’s unlikely you’ll even get noticed in their crowded social feed.
Text-only posts lack appeal amongst scrollers. Images, on the other hand, are much easier and quicker to process. Good quality, colourful photos are a great way to grab your audience’s attention and increase their desire to read your content.
That’s backed by numbers too. Buzzsumo found that Facebook updates with images got 2.3 times the engagement of those without, while Buffer saw 18% more clicks, 89% more likes and 150% more retweets on Twitter when using images.
Clearly, images have a massive impact on the engagement levels you get online. But it’s not enough to simply post any images. It goes without saying that they need to be relevant to your company, your audience and what you’re posting.
On top of that, the images you share online need to be high-quality. This is important to maintain professionalism and it also increases the likelihood that your content will be shared on social media.
Naturally, the challenge with both of the above is storing and organising those images. If you’re sourcing high-quality images that are relevant for a range of different purposes, you’ll likely want to use them again to make the most of your digital assets. That said, the more you have, the more storage space you require, and the more you’ll need to consider a proper image library.
To ensure that all staff collaborating on a project have access to relevant, high-resolution images, you will need to consider how your organisation stores its files. At iBase, our image library can store a huge amount of photos, regardless of file size or format, to ensure that the quality of your visual assets isn’t compromised.
Our digital asset management system comes with a fully flexible permissions model, so that you can grant access to key members of staff. To make life easier, you can also tag images to categorise them by event, location and keywords, making it easy to retrieve images and upload them to social media.
For more information, contact our expert team today.
