The importance of developing a social media image strategy
By Alexandra Reid
Humans have used images to tell stories for millennia, beginning with the rock art, tree carvings, and even tattoos of our ancient ancestors. Since the birth of the practice, marketers have used images as a powerful communications method for company branding and to influence the purchasing decisions of other businesses as well as mass populations of people. It should therefore come as no surprise that images have recently risen as a focal point in our most modern communications practices.
There’s no doubt that social media is becoming more visual. The rise of Pinterest, new developments at Vimeo, the domination of YouTube, the proliferation of new image sharing tools, and Facebook’s new Timeline developments and recent acquisition of Instagram demonstrate that social sites are both acknowledging and encouraging a more visual web.
As Social Media B2B explains, “Facebook already told us that photos and videos are the most important types of content because they encourage the most engagement.”
“In a general sense, (Facebook’s) acquisition (of Instagram) on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text — and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Michael Downing, founder and CEO of social video service Tout, told ReadWriteWeb. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.”
