IMAGES ARE THE MAKING OF SOCIAL MEDIA

We know content is king – people will always want something informative/interesting/funny or relevant to read. But how do you keep readers engaged in a piece of long copy?

With withering attention spans so prevalent, the answer has to be with images. Something to break up the long blocks of writing, and to visually demonstrate what’s going on. Images attract the eye, draw people in and keep them there – and there’s a higher chance your work will be shared too if the images are particularly appealing.

Browsing quickly through a sea of information is all very well – from blog posts to Facebook posts and Tweets, our messages have traditionally been getting shorter. But this is an ideal chance to take people through to longer pieces of work, by keeping them engaged with an image.

• IMAGE PSYCHOLOGY

People like pictures – we know that. But understanding why we’re drawn to something is a great starting point.

The first is emotional pull. A suitable picture can evoke emotions – anything from joy to hate, sadness to disgust. This is well known by psychiatrists, politicians and marketers! It just needs to be the correct image for the message you’re trying to convey.

The second reason is content overload. People get bored faster. They see so much – they’re inundated with information and messages. We’re not great at filtering down the content overload, so an image allows us to scan things, keep hold of the story, without drowning in it all.

• CATALOGUE LAYOUT

You may be old enough to remember old-style catalogue hat every home used to have in the 70s and 80s. Thousands of pages, showing every product the company carried – all laid out with pictures, short descriptions and text to captivate and sell to the reader.

This is really similar to how Google+ and Facebook now operate, with online marketing campaigns and platforms featuring image-laden layouts. And think of Pinterest – the 4th highest driver of internet traffic in the world. People spend much more time on Pinterest now that a few years ago as it’s so easy to stay there… 30 pages of images and little text are so much more absorbing than a long post!

Flipboard is another example. It’s an app that allows someone to read the content in magazine format. Alternatively, there’s also an option to create your own magazines. It’s very similar to Pinterest, images accompanied by small amounts of text, allowing the reader to filter quickly through to what they want to read.

• HOW TO GAIN EXPOSURE

If an image doubles your chance of exposure purely because it’s an image, that’s one thing.

It also gives the opportunity to embed separate metadata from your post – another entirely independent way to add in some good SEO to your metrics.

Canva is a great website with an extensive collection of tools and templates to manipulate and find the right imagery. And if you’re in it seriously too – make sure you track the reach of your posts with social media monitoring software.