by Rosemarie Ascherl-Lenhard, PR Foreman
Images make everything better.
It’s no secret that we are immersed in the “Age of Visual” culture, with cameras in everyone’s back pocket and with more than 2.5 billion camera phones in use, photos are becoming the “universal language.” If you’ve been paying attention to marketing and social media trends over the past several years, you know that the entire internet is becoming more visual. In fact, a picture might be worth far more than a thousand words now.
Shifts in the social media world are putting bigger emphasis on using high-quality photos in content. It should also be no surprise that the fastest growing social media networks are Instagram and Facebook.
Adding images to your content could be a lot more important than you might think. According to Jeff Bullas’ blog post 6 Powerful Reasons Why You Should Include Images in Your Marketing, images encourage people to engage with your content.
Thinking about your own news browsing habits, you have to admit that you are more likely to click on an article that has an intriguing image.
Jeff shared some interesting stats, including:
- Articles with images get 94% more total views
- Including photos or videos with press releases increases views by more than 45%
- Facebook engagement rates for photos are 37% higher than plain text
- In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product
- In an online store, customers think that the quality of a product’s image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
Read the rest of his blog post for some tips on integrating photos into your content.