The first thing to remember when creating attention capturing content for social media and your website is that imagery is king! Pictures outperform all other content on social media by a 120%.  Yep, image posts receive about 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more link clicks than just text posts.

This may be due to how quickly our brains recognize aspects of images and how much more likely we are to remember them days later.

Have you ever heard someone say “a picture is worth a thousand words?” Well, next time you do, feel free to break out that “Wrong Button!” app you’ve been waiting to use on someone and buzz away. Studies have shown that the brain processes imagery about 60,000 times faster than it does text. So, in reality, a picture may be worth 60,000 words. That’s a lot more than a measly 1,000… that person deserved to be buzzed.

Remember that as infants we start to learn how to speak by using images to define words, rather than words to define images. Then, once we have labels for the images we see, we then connect those labels to text to learn how to read. Our brain activity goes through a longer process to make sense of text than it does when we view an image.

Now that you know how our brain’s process imagery, it’s not too difficult to see why the use of images in social media content is so important.  But it’s not just the use of imagery that’s important, it’s the use of GOOD imagery through design. Let’s take a look at some numbers to drive this home. Imagine that you push out a piece of conversion content on social media that links back to a landing page on your website.  It’s not even setup to sell anything, just capture email addresses.  Getting someone in your demographic to give you their email address is simple enough, right?  Well depending on how the design of the content and the landing page are laid out, it can be a lot harder than you may think.  

In continuing with this setup, we’ll say 1000 people looked at your content.  40% of people respond better to visual content than just plain text.  So, if you didn’t even use a photo, you probably lost 400 people right there, but let’s say you did and keep going.  Over 46% of people say a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of a company and it only takes the average person about 1/10th of a second to decide how they feel about a website’s design.  If your website is lacking, then you may have just lost almost 500 potential customers in less than a second.