3 Tips to Help Your Visual Content Stand Out on Social Media

Marketers everywhere are constantly told to “show instead of tell” their offers if they want to attract and keep a prospective client’s attention. This rule certainly applies to social media as much as it does to any other marketing tactic. On any given day, users post 350 million photos to Facebook. On that same day, Instagram users upload 80 million photos. And in just one minute of that day, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, according to Digital Marketing Ramblings.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by these figures, you’re not alone! The sheer amount of visual content already out there is staggering. It’s safe to say that, without a cohesive strategy, your voice won’t cut through the clutter.
In a time where everyone is doing visual content, here are 3 tips to help your visual content stand out on social media:

Listen to your audience. Social media is all about what your audience wants to see, so it makes sense to focus on them first. Listen and learn from your community. See what your target audience is sharing and commenting on. Make sure your content is relevant to what your consumers want.

Mix it up. Visual content is not limited to photos. With Snapchat, Instagram, and many other social media platforms becoming more business friendly, video is becoming part of marketers’ repertoire with 93% using video for content marketing. Users are consuming these videos almost as quickly as they are made with online video now accounting for half of all traffic on mobile devices, according to HubSpot.

Follow the leaders. Keeping up with social media trends can make or break your brand. Take a look at the social media accounts of the leaders in your industry regularly to make sure that you’re keeping up with the latest trends. There are many tools out there that you can use to help create your own compelling visual stories. But, a word to the wise…

There are many websites out there offering “free” images through creative commons licensing, but there have been some recent incidents involving bloggers getting called out for copyright violations because they used a “royalty-free” image that actually wasn’t. You always run the risk of the free photo later being sold and copyrighted, which means you can’t use it anymore, or worse, being uploaded by a person who didn’t actually create it, thus making you an unwitting accomplice to copyright violation. When in doubt, protect yourself and don’t download the image. Consider investing in purchasing your own stock photos, or better yet, dust off the camera and brush up on your photography skills to create your own.

Visual content is an important part of your social media marketing strategy. In today’s information overload, visual content can help you quickly communicate your message and capture the attention of your audience.