You’ve probably heard that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Visual content is more than just pictures — it’s engaging infographics, GIFs, and memes. And these days, people expect to see it on every brand’s social media channels. After all, pictures are easier to digest and process than plain text, and they get shared more often too. The importance of visual content in social media is huge — let the numbers speak for themselves:
- On average, when information is combined with an image, people remember it 65% better.
- Tweets with images increase their likelihood of being retweeted by 150%.
- Based on the company’s visual content, 95% of B2B customers form their opinions based on that.
As you can see, visual content is essential for the success of your social media marketing campaigns. Now, let’s take a look at 8 tips that you can consider when creating visual content on social media channels from here on out.
1. Connect With Your Audience
Visual content is the cornerstone of social media marketing. It conveys what you need to say, helps people understand your message, and makes them want to engage with your brand. To create images that connect with your audience, follow these tips:
- Use your brand colours and logo: Always connect your brand identity with your visuals. If you have a well-designed logo, use it on all social media channels so that users can easily recognize it. The same goes for colours, use those that match the rest of your branding efforts so they help build brand awareness among consumers and other businesses who interact with yours online. You need to create a colour palette and follow that. Look at the colour wheel and choose complementary, monochromatic, analogous, and triadic colours.
Digi-Tip: Consider the psychology of colours (what emotions they evoke) before choosing a colour palette for you.
- Have a theme: You need to come up with a theme that you want to follow and create social media post designs based on that.
- Think about what interests your audience: Research your customer’s interests and think of what kind of content may interest them.
Digi-Tip: Always check the correct image size for each social media platform for creating better visuals.
2. Tell Your Brand’s Story
Tell your brand’s story with images. Take advantage of this by posting images that:
- Show your product or service in use: This could be by a customer or by you. The best way to make content about your product interesting and useful is by showing it being used. For example, if you sell a coffee machine, show someone using it to make a cup of delicious coffee. If you sell a vacuum cleaner, show someone using the vacuum cleaner on their carpet or rug. The more people see how something works, the easier it is for them to imagine themselves using that thing.
- Show how your product will benefit the customer: It doesn’t have to be a whole story, instead, show some key benefits that the customer will get from your product.
- Show the process behind what you do and how it benefits others: For example, if you’re a marketing agency and want to show how clients’ businesses have improved from working with you — post images of the before-and-after results of an SEO campaign (or any other digital marketing services).
- Don’t forget about creating emotions: Keep in mind that people most of the time are driven by their emotions. So, try to create an emotion with your visual content designs.
3. Show Your Team
As you look for photos to use on social media, be sure to consider your team members’ own photos. This is an easy way to show your customers what life is like inside the company and how much fun it can be. Take pictures when your software engineers are programming some new feature for your app or when your salespeople are helping customers with their purchase decisions. This will help people see how dedicated and hardworking they are. Finally, you should share photos of fun events that happen both internally (within the company) as well as externally (with clients). Showing off these images makes people feel like they’re part of something special — and they are.
4. Create a Collage
You can use a collage to tell a longer story. When you create a collage, make sure you use the same colour scheme throughout so that your brand is cohesive. Use images in different sections of your collage to tell one story and then use text overlays on different images to tell another story. Text overlays are a great way to add context and information to your visual content. For example, if you’re sharing an image of your new shirt on social media, you may want to use text overlays to give the viewers more information about where they can buy it as well as its price. Text overlays are also a great way to add urgency or call-to-action (CTA) elements.
5. Use GIFs and Infographics
Infographics and GIFs are the perfect way to communicate complex information as simply as possible.
You’ll notice GIFs everywhere on social media, and for good reason — they’re a great way to show how something works, looks, or feels in just a few seconds.
And infographics are great ways to educate your customers or share some statistics regarding their topic of interest. Visualizing data can help others understand your point and make it easier for them to share. This is why infographics are so popular. They’re a great way to show trends, patterns, and comparisons. You can create an infographic that compares the average spend of users who have been using your service for three months with everyone else to illustrate this difference visually.
6. Avoid Stock Photos
You can do better by opting for custom photography instead of stock images. Custom images give you more control over how the image will be used in social media posts and ads. It allows room for creativity, which leads to visually interesting posts that are more likely to draw attention from users than generic stock images could ever achieve. User-generated content is even better: Authentic images of customers interacting with your product (or talking about it) will always speak louder than any stock photo ever could. These images build relationships and establish trust. 
7. Use Different Content Types
When creating visual content for social media, you need to use all three types of content (educational, entertaining, and enlightening) to resonate with your audience. If you’re only posting information-based posts like blog posts or product descriptions on social media, you might not be reaching your full potential. As the names suggest:
- Educational content refers to educating customers about your services.
- Entertaining visuals, like comics, memes, GIFs, etc. keep customers engaged and make them remember your products even better.
- Enlightening content refers to creating content that will encourage customers to look at their lives with new eyes. They not only show your customer’s problems but also ways to solve them. This way, you can help customers make the right decision by choosing you.
8. Make Visual Content SEO-friendly
You should use alt text, keywords in the image filename, and the same keywords in your post’s description to help boost your visual SEO. Make sure that all of your images have alt text (the text alternative for an image). This will help search engines understand what the image is about and rank it appropriately in search results. It’s used by search engines to index your images and make them more easily findable in searches, which can lead to people seeing your content. You can post SEO-friendly visuals on Pinterest.
Digi-Tip: Use keywords in the hashtags of your images, create SEO-friendly captions, and include geotags.
Hope you found this list helpful. If you want to take your social media strategy to the next level, remember that visual content is one way to do it. Take some time to explore these tips and see which ones work best for your brand!