Whether it’s your website, your emails, your blog posts, or your social media presence, images are crucial. Take a look around at other sites and social networks, and it’s not too hard to see that content is moving in a visual direction.
Visuals tell a story almost instantly. And not to sound cliche or anything, but it is true, a picture is worth a thousand words. But beyond the fact that they make your website look nice, images actually play an important role in getting better results with your online marketing efforts.
6 Reasons Why You Need To Make Images A Part Of Your Online Strategy
1. Images Increase Engagement
This is true for social media and your blog. Images help you engage your audience in a way that text just can’t. Photos on social are engagement powerhouses and can help you get more retweets, likes, comments and shares.
2. Images Can Help Increase Readership
A great image can help you in attract new readers to your website and to your blog. The image can be used to gain attention from the get go. Follow that up with a killer headline and you’ve got readers.
3. Images Show Up In Google Search
This is one of the most important aspects of using images. Of course you need to optimize your images correctly for best results. Here’s a good guide.
4. Images Auto-populate When Web Pages Are Shared
Ever tried to share something from your site or blog to Facebook and no image shows up? We want to avoid this. You need Facebook optimized (and socially optimized) images on each page so that when you and others share, the correct image populates.
5. Images Help Increase Sales
Not only do images increase conversions, they can also increase sales. Of course your product images have to be great, but they should also tug on the emotions of your potential buyers.
6. Images Increase Reach
Images can increase social reach by gathering more attention from your viewer. They can encourage shares which increases reach too. Add a few more images in there and your Facebook reach can increase too.
See, images are awesome!
How To Make Your Blog Images Better
One trick that I think works wonders for making your blog images work better for social is by adding the title of the blog to the image. It’s such a simple and easy fix but can help increase click throughs and engagement a lot.
Other things to think about include sizing the image for social. When it is shared, you want the whole image to show up, not just part of it. Here’s a quick guide to sizing your images for social media.
