Social media plays a vital role in today’s digital marketing. Marketers leverage social media platforms to target specific audiences and deliver high-quality content to a large number of people at the same time. That way, marketers can effectively promote their businesses, as well as their products and services. However, almost every business on the market uses social media to tailor their messages and promote their offers by posting content on social media networks. As a matter of fact, 140 million tweets are generated and over two million videos get uploaded to social media every day.

In addition, there are over 1.5 billion individual pieces of content on the Internet, which makes it very difficult for the content you produce to truly stand out in the crowd. That’s why visual content is key for your social media marketing success. In fact, people are visual beings and they process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text, making visual content a lot more popular than textual information. Here are a few reasons why visual content is important for social media marketing.

People prefer visuals
As mentioned before people are visual beings. Online consumers can retain only 10 to 20% of the information they read or hear about, but once that information is paired with visual elements, the information retained suddenly goes up to 65%. At any given time, the human brain can only process a very limited amount of information. In addition, any information that can be processed faster will take priority in grabbing a person’s attention.

That’s why visuals and images are more suited for content than simple blocks or lines of text. People on social media are more willing to engage with visual content. In fact, 40% of online users will provide a more favorable response to visual content than plain textual content. For instance, tweets with images get 150% more retweets than tweets without images, while Facebook posts with images generate 2.3 times more engagement than posts without them.

Increases views
Your social media content will generate 94% more views if it contains visual elements, which proves that people prefer to engage with content that’s both informative and pleasing to the eye. This can prove invaluable, especially if you want to deliver a well-tailored message to your audience and ensure your message has reached your audience accordingly. Moreover, your social media post views can increase by 48% if they contain both images and videos.

Also, press releases that contain photos can generate 14% more views when published. Attracting the right kind of attention with your social media marketing is essential for your campaign’s success. By adding visual content to your strategies, you’ll be able to attract the necessary attention required to get your message through to your target audience.

Boosts engagement
High-quality visual content included in your social media marketing efforts can generate more likes, shares and comments than a simple text would. As a matter of fact, your articles can experience a 37% increase in engagement if they are optimized with compelling visual content. Furthermore, an engaging visual content is more likely to go viral, meaning that people will share it further with their friends, family and other members of their online community. Furthermore, engaging visuals aren’t just meant to go viral. They can also help your audience better understand or appreciate the message you’re trying to deliver.

For example, your message will be much better received if it’s backed by a soothing nature photo. Moreover, if your content is clickable, it can bring you a lot of inbound links; just make sure it contains your logo so everyone knows where the content originated from. Inbound links make your content more relevant and improve your search ranking, while generating 60% more interest from your target audience.

Your audience loves video
Video is one of the most important visual aspects used in content marketing today. That being said, by 2019, 80% of internet traffic will consist of video traffic. Generally, online audience prefers watching videos rather than reading plain text. In fact, four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, while 90% of consumers state that watching a product video is very helpful in making a purchasing decision.

In addition, 64% of consumers are more willing to make a purchase after watching a product video. Making video the main visual aspect of your social media strategy will undoubtedly boost your sales. Moreover, including video as appealing visual content will boost engagement among social followers. The fact of the matter is that Facebook users watch 8 billion videos per day, and a live video turned out to be the most popular format.

Visual elements, such as images, videos, infographics and other are undeniably more interesting and appealing to social media users, as well as online consumers in general. Implementing visual content into your social media marketing will not only improve views, engagement and social following, but it will also help your content attract the right kind of attention and boost engagement from your target audience.