Customer Experience

By adaptive - April 22nd, 2014

Marketers that want to make a lasting connection with consumers need to develop a strong visual language

The latest piece of research from SocialBakers illustrates the power of images. Looking at branded Facebook pages, it is clear that images are vital for high levels of engagement. The brands that command the highest number of followers had visual content on their updates in 75% of cases. Of course there is no direct link made between these numbers, click throughs and conversions, but what is clear is that images are a central foundation of engaging updates.

Love it or hate it, Facebook remains the kind of referrals according to the new stats from Shareaholic based on four months of data collected from 300,000+ websites which reach more than 400 million unique visitors each month. “Facebook users love to — or can’t help but — click links on their feed,” says Danny Wong, Content Marketing, Shareaholic Reports, Social Media. “Last month, Facebook drove 21.25% of the overall traffic sites received. Since December, FB’s share of traffic grew 38% (5.81 percentage points).”

Their research also reinforces the fact that rich media is rapidly developing across all of the social media channels. “Pinterest further solidified its 2nd place standing; its share of traffic grew a whopping 48% (2.31 percentage points) since December,” comments Shareaholic. “Last month, it claimed a 7.10% share of overall traffic, which is orders of magnitude greater than the shares for each of the 6 remaining social networks. For sites overall, Pinners are not the most engaged bunch. For brands though, Piqora states a pin is worth $0.78 in sales. Naturally, results will vary from site to site.”

It seems social media is moving inexorably towards becoming a visual medium. SocialBakers continues: “Looking at interactions among the top 10% of all monitored content, we can see that videos and albums have almost the same percent share (3–4%) of total interactions as they do overall share of published content. Links and statuses lose some of that overall share of engagement when we look solely at the top 10%. Conversely, photos increase their share; the vast majority of the top 10% were photo posts.”

Show me something

Of course static images will make up the vast majority of the content that will be included on social media networks. Trillions of photos are taken each year on the 1.5 billion camera-equipped phones now in use is developing an ecosystem of new content.

Video though, remains the burgeoning form of visual content. ComScore’s Video Metrix product showed that 61% of Americans watched an average of 397 online videos in January 2014.

For all brands thinking about the visual assets they can leverage across all of the social media platforms they maintain a presence on should be a central component of their marketing strategy. Social media has increasingly become a visual space, as consumers clearly prefer this form of content, which they widely share.

[Image Source: Freedigitalphotos.net]