Use Visual Content on Social Media to get higher engagement

You have by now heard everyone say that you need to use visual content on social media to get attention.

Visual content is important to make your content stand out on social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Platforms like Instagram & Pinterest are already primarily visual anyway – so if you are using these platforms the focus is on the quality of the visual.

Simply put – Use of visual content on noisy feeds such as Twitter is more likely to attract attention and high quality or interesting photographs on Instagram is more likely to stand out than generic stock photography.

Visual content might be either images (such as photographs or infographics) or videos. Build up your collection of visual content by taking more photographs, using curated stock photography and creating your own graphics, infographics and images specifically for social media.

Content with a visual aspect get more engagement. Therefore if you are using visuals this can be great for engagement on social media (e.g. likes, retweets etc).

However, it is important to remember that it doesn’t always lead to click-throughs from the social media content to the actual desired destination such as your website. So make sure it has a clear purpose and you have a clear Call To Action (CTA).

What is engagement?

When I am talking about engagement I mean your engagement on Social Media. Social media engagement measures the public shares, likes and comments for your social media efforts. Engagement has historically been a common metric for evaluating social media performance and each social media platform measures engagement slightly differently.

Why does Visual Content lead to higher engagement?

There are many reasons why visual content tends to get higher engagement, but the key ones are – they stand out in text-heavy feeds and our brains process visuals faster than text.

While visual heavy content will produce higher engagement it is important to continue to measure.

How should you measure engagement?

Each social media platform has engagement options and methods for measuring engagement but the simple ones are as follows:

• Twitter: Re-tweets, Likes and followers
• Facebook: Shares, likes and followers
• Instagram: Likes and followers
• LinkedIn: Likes (reactions), Shares, Comments and Followers.

These metrics tell you about the popularity of a given post and of your social media feed. Likes and Shares show that a particular post has been seen and appreciated by someone. Follows/Followers indicate a higher level of investment, meaning users want to see more of your content on a regular basis.

Look at the analytics for your social media posts on each of the platforms that you are using. This will help you identify when are people interacting with your posts and when are they sharing/liking? What type of posts are getting the most engagement?

By keeping an eye on this it will help you identify what content your audience enjoys and what they want more of. It also can help you identify and measure your progress against your social media goals. When your post engagement rates go up you are improving your reach.

Further Reading:

• How to Create Engaging Content on Social Media
• Are my social media posts driving traffic to my website?
• Measuring for Social Media Success.