Words aren’t enough anymore, prospects want more visuals and they wanted them…yesterday.
55 million photos are uploaded to Instagram daily, Pinterest (heavily driven by visuals) receives 50% higher conversion rates for traffic, and 40% of people respond to visual information better than plain text.
Another telling factor comes from Twitter. On October 29th, 2013 Twitter released a more visual timeline with self-expanded picture previews. The images that appear on the Twitter Timeline are essentially picture previews of the full-sized image and they do have their set image size.
But, what really matters is the data behind these Twitter visualizations. The most telling factor of a tweet’s effectiveness and whether or not it has resonated with your audience is the number of retweets it receives. At TrackMaven, we set out to find that in our Retweet Report and we found some data-backed ways to step up your tweets visually to ensure their effectiveness.
Pictures Please: How to Visually Step Up Your Tweets
1. Images with Tweets are Important
In our Retweet Report we found that including pictures into tweets have an effect on the number retweets a tweet can receive. A tweet without a picture receives 0.133 retweets, but a tweet with a picture receives on average 0.404 retweets.
2. Images with Tweets Post-Picture Preview are ESSENTIAL
The effectiveness of pictures in regards to the number of retweets a tweet will receive is clear with the graph above, but it’s even more apparent post-picture previews on the Twitter Timeline.
After a more visual timeline was introduced on Twitter, it only increased the likelihood in more retweets. Post-preview picture tweets receive on average 0.496 retweets.
3. Size the Image Correctly
Facebook is known to degrade your images quite a bit after you upload them, Google+ does the same with graphics, and Twitter does it as well. With the new previews on the Twitter, there are new dimensions that you need to take into account.
The images on the Twitter timelines will expand your image to fit the size, reduce it to scale, or recognize faces in the picture to make them the central focus. Twitter seems to still be trying to get the right formula down, but until then we did find the dimensions for the images. The images on the Twitter Timelines are 438 X 220 px. Sizing your image accordingly to the dimensions below helps to ensure you have what you want as the central focus.
4. Recycle images
Photos on Facebook generate 53% more likes than the average Facebook post. With those images on Facebook, don’t just use them once. Why not incorporate them into the tweets as well. Or if you created an infographic why not include a snippet of it for the Twitter image? How about even using one of the pictures in your blog post into the Twitter image? With the amount of content that you are creating you are bound (at least I hope) to have some sort of images already in use, so use that to your advantage and recycle the images for usage in your tweets as well.
5. Revamp Your Sponsored Tweets
Because it’s all about the visuals now, there really isn’t a reason why your sponsored tweets shouldn’t receive an ad refresh with some images or even a Vine. As stated above, sizing the image correctly is the first step, but then adding in some type of CTA in your image/graphic is another idea to add something new to your sponsored tweets to get Twitter users to convert into leads.
2014 is going to be a huge year for content (Not that any year before wasn’t a major content marketing year) because it represents a shift into satisfying the consumers need for more things visual. With that, why not add a few images to spruce up those characters.