7 Proven Reasons to Use Visual Content in Social Media [Updated 2021]

As a busy team of one, you need your marketing efforts to result in more sales, which is why using visual content in social media is a simple method to attract, engage, and acquire leads and customers.

Sure, everyone is talking about how important visual content is in your strategy. But, you probably didn’t realize that including images in your posts makes your content—and your business—more:

1) Attractive,
2) Engaging,
3) Understandable,
4) Memorable, and,
5) Relatable.

You need these five factors to help stand out in an overcrowded market with much competition!

Visuals are a budget-friendly, simple but powerful way to help you differentiate your brand while communicating your message clearly and quickly. And by visuals, I’m talking about graphics, videos, photos, graphs, infographics, charts, memes, gifs…just about any content that isn’t text-based.

In this article, you’ll discover how and why images help you attract, engage, and acquire customers. Let’s get to the good stuff!

Why Using Visual Content in Social Media Improves Your Marketing

1) Visual Content Attracts Followers

You’re competing against others for space and visibility across social media platforms as well as in search engines. Textual posts simply don’t get noticed because they lack the wow factor that separates your content from everyone else’s.

Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

Visuals make a big difference in an overcrowded social media feed and help attract new followers. Plus, visuals keep the attention of your existing fans. Look to visual content as a quick way to:

• express your brand;
• convey an emotion;
• highlight important data;
• illustrate intangible concepts;
• differentiate your business;
• showcase your product and offers; and,
• increase traffic to your site.

Case in point, which of these two posts grabs your attention and makes you more likely to pause to read?

The tweet without an image?

Or the tweet with an image that uses humor to tie into the headline and get users to click on the link?

2) Visual Content Engages Followers

Simply put, your content with images has more chance of being read, liked/favorited, commented on, and shared than your text-only content.

Look at these statistics:

• Posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. (Webdam)
• Visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. (Buffer)
• Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. (Buzzsumo)
• Visuals in color increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. (Xerox)
• Tweets with video get 10 times more engagement than those without. (Hubspot)

You might as well take advantage of images to create more engaging content. And believe me, you need all of the help you can get with engagement!

After all, social media is more competitive than ever. The platforms use engagement as a factor to determine how to prioritize your content in the feed and how often to show it. It turns out that popularity does matter (just like in high school)!

The more people engage with your social media posts, the more likely platforms are likely to show it to users.

Here’s a real-life example. This Facebook image post from Post Planner’s business page received over 64 million views, 150,000 likes, 2,300 comments and 787,000 shares—ORGANICALLY. (Let that sink in for a minute…)

PostPlanner used only two textual words, but the image’s impact helped make the post go viral. And it’s not even their image!

For a business built on helping customers find shareable and engaging content, Post Planner did a great job of showing how effective their product is!

Can you see the benefits of using visuals to boost your engagement, brand awareness, and potentially your profit?

3) Visual Content Is Easily Understood

When it comes to comprehension, our minds prefer visuals because they communicate more information, more effectively.

90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and images are processed 600,000 times faster than text.

According to an infographic by Column Five Media, humans are biologically wired to process the world visually. Human brains process visual cues in 1/4 second!

With your brain pre-wired to interpret relationships between objects, visuals allow for almost instant comprehension with minimal effort. Also, your brain interprets visuals faster than it can process language.

Take a look at a snippet of the infographic “Why Our Brains Love Visual Content” from Column Five. You’ll likely find how quickly your mind interprets relationships visually.

With the average consumer’s attention span at eight seconds or less, visuals help your customers understand your message quickly.

4) Visual Content is Memorable

Visual content is memorable for similar reasons why it’s easily understandable. Thank you, science!

As we just discussed, your brain quickly makes connections to already-stored information in your memories, which helps with retention. If you add emotional and aesthetic appeal into the design, your brain further deepens the encoding and retention of information.

Said another way, including images that are pleasing or evoke emotion will make your social media posts more memorable for your audience. Then, when it’s time to make a purchase or donation, your audience will remember your business.

People remember 80% of what they see but only 20% of what they read and only 10% of what they hear. So use your images strategically. You’ll help your audience remember you and your message when they need you in the future.

5) Visual Content is Relatable

My favorite part of visual content is that it can make your social media posts highly relatable. People buy from those they know, like, and trust—which is where that “relatable” factor really makes a difference.

According to Wyzowl’s research, 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.

When people relate to your content on an emotional level, they form a bond or relationship with your brand that is perceived as “likeability.” Let’s face it, followers are attracted to those they like!  Humor, data, quotes, and even personal photos in your posts can really help people to get to know you and build relationships online.

Don’t underestimate the value of being a business or person to whom others can relate. According to Psychology Today, emotion has an influential role in consumers’ purchase decisions:

• fMRI neuro-imagery shows that consumers primarily use emotions rather than information when evaluating brands.
• Research reveals that the emotional response to an ad has a greater influence on a consumer’s intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content.
• The Advertising Research Foundation’s research concluded that the emotion of “likeability” is the most predictive measure of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.
• Studies show that positive emotions toward a brand have more influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments which are based on a brand’s attributes.

If you take what you’ve learned so far, it’s not a stretch to see the correlation between relatable visual social media content and purchase decisions.

6) Visual Content is Super Shareable

The reality is that you need more visibility and reach to get in front of more people. Unfortunately, since platforms are swamped with tons of content, it’s getting harder to get seen. So, motivate people to share your content by including share-worthy images.

Moving, powerful, thought-provoking, hilarious, fun, and clever images encourage people to share your content with their own networks. Who can resist reposting a visual that caused a reaction of surprise, laughter, tears, or admiration?

Check out Visualize Value’s Twitter account for inspiration. The creator, Jack Butcher, transforms quotes into images that convey the sentiment much more powerfully than the words alone. Brilliant—and very shareable.

You know that I especially love this example since I’m a big proponent of using quotes with accompanying images in social media.

That said, it’s unnecessary (and not very effective) to create content for the sake of “going viral.” Thankfully, the viral nature of social media content isn’t required for you to benefit. Even a few people sharing your content can boost your visibility and reach.

Definitely consider the impact your images could have on your visibility. And, the next time you create a visual, incorporate some of the characteristics that make it super shareable.

7) The Benefits of Visuals Extend Beyond Social Media

When you think about social media trends and the popularity of more visual platforms like Instagram and YouTube, it makes sense to incorporate more visuals into your marketing. Not only because of the reasons listed above but also because you’re creating assets that boost the effectiveness of your other content.

According to Venngage, 62% of marketers create visuals for blog and website content followed by Facebook (49%) and Instagram (47%).

The benefits of visuals extend beyond social media. You can most certainly repurpose social media visuals for blog posts, emails, podcasts, and more.

P.S. You can also repurpose blog visuals into social media content! Larry Kim has one of the best Twitter feeds (follow him if you don’t already) and is an account to look at for visual inspiration. Check out how he turned a large infographic into a tweet:

You’ll get far more mileage out of your hard work by re-using your visual content across multiple platforms. And that is a seventh reason to use more visuals!

In addition to the added productivity of repurposing content, visual content also boosts your visibility, authority, and readability of your website and blog. Visuals break up text, convey meaning, support skimming, and make your content more appealing.

Plus, people love video. It’s one of the best forms of content marketing for conversion. But video isn’t popular with humans only. According to Wistia, search engines like Google often rank posts with video higher than those without.

The point is, your social media visuals 1) are usable beyond social platforms and 2) increase the effectiveness of your other content assets. #WINNING

Social Media Visuals are Becoming the Norm

At this point, you’ve got to have some visual component to your content to compete. In the past, not everyone used visuals. But nowadays it’s the norm. So, it’s no longer about IF you should use visual content. It’s about WHAT visual content to create.

Unfortunately, Venngage’s survey of marketers found they struggled with producing visuals consistently. Other struggles included great design and sourcing the content.

With that in mind, you may need suggestions for how to fast track visual content creation. Here’s how I manage:

• Templates
• Swipe files for inspiration (thank you Pinterest!)
• Swipe files for content research
• Competitor analysis
• Screenshots
• Animated GIFs
• Emojis

Swipe files and templates make the research and design easier and faster. Looking at your competitors provides inspiration to make ideation faster.

And when you don’t have time for graphic creation? Sprinkle in screenshots, animated GIFs, or emojis, which all provide a visual component to your posts.

Don’t be afraid to get creative. Take a few risks, try something new. Not every visual needs to be a work of art. But each one should be relevant to the content and to your audience.

The important takeaway here is to understand the role visuals play in your marketing – across social media and everywhere else!

If your marketing hasn’t been as effective as you’d hoped, try incorporating more high-quality, relevant visuals into your content to see if it helps.

UPDATED JULY 6, 2021 | PUBLISHED AUGUST 3, 2016