The 10 New Rules Of Visual Content Marketing

When it comes to visual content, your customers expect something very different compared to just a few years ago. It is now supercharged by mobiles and visual social media networks.

It used to be OK to have a static website gallery, post text to your social channels, and use corporate photos and videos online. Now, readers depend on visuals to figure out whether your content is worth their time.

Expectations of consumers have changed too. They no longer have time to click through to an image or link to see what your content is about. They make split-second decisions based on the visual content provided.

So whether your content is being consumed within social channels or on your website, visual content remains a powerful tool – but only if done correctly.

In short, the rules of visual content have changed.

Why should you use visual content?

Just take a quick look at these 3 snack size facts about the visually wired human. In a visual content format.

Source: Visual Website Optimizer blog

Below are 10 new rules of visual content marketing. Break them and you risk losing your customers.

1. The law of the recent

When we go online, most of the content we consume is from today, or at best yesterday.

Content from last week is practically unreachable unless you’re looking for something specific. And content from last year has become history so ancient, it might as well be obsolete.

Skeptical? Test it.

Go to your favourite social network. Open it up and take a look at your home feed. Can you find a post from last week in the first 25 updates?

Notice something else? The only way you can tell how recent a post is, is by the time stamp on them. Posts from today will either have the time they were published visible or tell you how long ago the post was made. E.g. an hour ago, five hours ago, yesterday.

In order for your content to be relevant, it has to be recent. The best way to do that is by time stamping your content or featuring topical events.

Honda has created a social hub on their website where they curate and display recent customer content.

2. The law of authenticity

People are more likely to trust a referral from a friend or relative than a company.

In fact, research has shown Millennials are even more likely to trust a complete stranger than a company. It’s why user-generated content is considered far more compelling than any content a brand produces.

Photos and videos from your customers tell the real story of your brand and are far more effective.

NZone is an extreme sport (skydiving) company. Customers who share personal pictures of their experience increase authenticity and can instil trust for anyone considering making a purchase.

3. The law of credibility

The law of credibility states that your customers must be willing to stand by your brand by publicly aligning themselves with it.

In layman terms, if your customers are posting images and sharing their experiences, they should be linking back to you or tagging you in their social media updates.

Think about it. What would you trust more? An image or video shared by a company showing how happy and satisfied their clients are? Or the same thing shared by one of their customers?

Dole is an international brand which markets and distributes fruit including pineapples, bananas and paw paws. They often get their customers to share content from events or at home consuming the product.

4.  The law of relevance

Visual content needs to be presented in context. It has to be relevant, informative and well organized.

So if you’re selling a product online, you need to provide corresponding visual content for it. Make sure you place relevant content in the right place.

For example if you are selling  particular line of clothing not only do you need to place photos of that on the right web pages, you also need to place the correct user-generated photos on the right webpage, which in this case may involve your customers with those clothes in a real life situation.

Superette is an on-line retailer. They take care of this law by linking customer photos to their products.

5. The law of the caption

A picture may be worth a thousand words but a caption or headline can often bring it further to life.

There’s no denying that we process visual content faster than text-based content. But a simple caption is often required to tell a visual story more effectively.

A caption also helps you communicate your brand’s identity. For example if your brand focuses on making things easy and fun for your customers, then the caption can be humorous.

The Press, a daily newspaper, ran a photo competition and asked their readers to submit their best backyard cricket photos for a World Cup promotion. One user submitted the image below with a caption that made a photo infinitely more interesting.

Source: The Press reader

6. The law of social

Your customers expect to be able to interact with your visual content – whether it’s on your social channels or on your website.

Make it easy for them by providing them opportunities to comment on your content, share them easily on their preferred social networks, and even email the content to their friends if they want to.

The law of social doesn't end here though. Your customers also expect you to acknowledge their efforts. If they've left a comment, reply to it. If they've shared on social media, thank them for it. Find a way to make it worth their while and they’ll continue giving your visual content the same attention.

Interislander – a ferry service ran a photo contest that asked their customers to share their favourite Interislander memory on their website or Instagram and tag them.

Needless to say, the competition was a huge hit!

7. The law of personality 

For too long brands have been bland and boring. Think stock photos.

Thankfully, the recent developments in visual content make it easy to bring a brand to life.

The right visuals, including photos, videos, infographics, and e-books can add depth to your brand story and reinforce your culture.

One of the easiest ways to do so is to give your customers a “behind the scenes” look. Show them what goes into making or marketing your brand, post pictures from office events, maybe even how you brainstorm.

The more your customers know about the culture of your company, the more your brand’s personality will shine through.

The Queensland Opera does this brilliantly. From pictures of their costume designs, rehearsals, and makeup – they keep their fans and followers engaged.

8. The law of consistency

Apart from engaging customers, the role of visual content is to reinforce your brand. For that to happen, your content needs to have consistency.

This isn’t strictly a new law, but it’s worth reinforcing. We’re not referring to publishing visual content consistently. It’s more about elements in your visuals that tell your target market that the visual is from your company – even if you’re not linked or tagged in it.

You can do this by using the same:

• Fonts and colours as your website
• Images in your company’s social media accounts and profile page headers
• Design element like a background, banner, or logo.

Customers should be able to recognize the content is from your brand at a glance.

All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, have their photos naturally branded. Whether their visuals are from their own team or from fans, they all include the All Blacks in one form or another.

9. The law of resilience

Content never sleeps and neither does your online presence.

Visual content is not a campaign that ends in a few days or weeks. It’s not a one-off thing. It’s an on-going strategy.

Make creating, publishing, and maintaining visual content a key part of your marketing strategy.

Jucy, one of tourism’s top content marketers, has created an on-going visual content, much of which is from their customers.

10. The law of quality

With cell phone cameras getting better and better by the day, customers have learned to take great photos and videos themselves.

And with the numerous filters available through Instagram and others, it’s possible to source high quality content from your customers.

The good news is, you can use that content and combine it with your own in-house efforts to help with your marketing activities.

Dilmah, a renowned tea company, encourages its tea drinkers to share their best photos with them for a chance to win awesome prizes like a 10-day trip to New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

A photo submitted by one of Dilmah fans.

Source: Dilmah Tea in the City Photo Competition

Visual content – a vital part of your content marketing strategy.

There’s no denying it. Visual content is a vital part of any marketing strategy.

The days of the old website photo gallery are far behind us. When done right, visual content can drive traffic to your site, increase page views, lower bounce rate, and convert website traffic into sales.

Use these new laws of visual content to up your marketing game and grow your business. Ignore them and you risk becoming obsolete.

How do your current visuals compare against these new laws? Are they giving you the results you want? Or are you struggling to create visuals that would interest your customers?

Author: Paul Bingham, COO Shuttlerock

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9 Social Media Rules That Are Meant To Be Broken

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively” Dalai Lama

Social media has evolved considerably over the past few years, in a way that nobody could’ve possibly predicted. Following the success of so many brands, the unwritten rules of social media became best practices and now strict guidelines to follow.

Sure, if you follow these rules you will have social media success, as they were thoroughly tested and proved successful by others. But to have an outstanding online presence you should not be afraid to risk breaking commandments.

It’s not easy though, it requires that you think, test, be patient and take chances that may not be successful. If you’re ready and willing to give it a try, go ahead and get outside your comfort zone by breaking one of these rules:

Rule #1: Don’t post too often and don’t repeat posts

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should start spamming your audience. What I’m saying by breaking this rule is that you should not be afraid to repeat your social updates to increase the chance of reaching new people. You don’t even have to repeat your post exactly the same. You can play with the wording, the pictures or the hashtags. You can share a quote or you can change your call to action. This way you can test different approaches and see which one gets the most clicks to further improve your strategy.

Why? Every day, on average, people post around 500 million messages on Twitter. Let that sink in for a moment. Even though, unlike Facebook, Twitter shows every message without applying any filtering algorithm, if your readers are not online the moment you share a post, they will not see it.

Everything is happening so fast that even Twitter suggests repeating your posts to reach a larger audience: “we saw that brands that tweet two to three times per day can typically reach an audience size that’s equal to 30% of their follower base during a given week.”

So, if you want your messages to reach your audience, don’t be afraid to repeat your posts.

“Social media “experts” recommend not posting too often–and certainly not repeating posts. Let’s just say that I disagree based on my experience. “- Guy Kawasaki

Rule #2: Not every social network is best for your company

We agree that you don’t have to be present on every social network out there. But, that doesn’t mean that you should limit yourself to Facebook or Twitter just because that’s what everybody in your niche does.

You might think that your business can’t have a presence on Pinterest or Instagram because you don’t have enough visual content to keep your followers engaged. But, if you’re creative enough you can make Pinterest work even for the most “boring” niches. You can share infographics, famous quotes or statistics in your industry just to name a few. You can have your Instagram account filled with “backstage” photos of your employees or inspirational quotes or even photos with your customers enjoying your products to show the human side of your brand.

Don’t be afraid to stand out! Instead of trying to follow the rules, you should focus on getting to know your customers and the social places they love and use. That’s where you should be too.

Rule #3: Limit yourself to 2 or 3 hashtags per post

A hashtag acts like a bookmark for all your online prospects to see. When one person accesses content with that particular hashtag, they get everything that’s associated with it.

This makes a wonderful tool for marketing. Why? If a business uses the right hashtags, then they find themselves in the right market with all the right people, waiting to do business with them. So there’s no one arguing against using hashtags.

But how many hashtags are enough to convert your readers and not drive them away? Experts say you should limit yourself to 2 or 3 hashtags per post to avoid annoying your audience. It turns out that this is OK for Twitter, but not for Instagram, where interactions are higher on posts with at least 10 hashtags. However, don’t take their word for it. The best way to find out the perfect number of hashtags to use is to test it yourself.

Rule #4: Share others’ content more than your content

There are many rules of social sharing (the 80/20 rule, the golden ratio, the rule of thirds and so on) and they all say you should share more of other people’s content than your own.

We get that! Everybody hates the idea of self-promotion. And that’s because of those overselling on social channels, even though it’s not quite the same with sharing your useful content that adds value to your audience. It all comes down to knowing your audience and their needs. You need to create and share content that adds value and solves your readers’ problems. Content that’s so amazing that’s almost a sin not to share it. If your posts are outstandingly useful, your readers will not mind if you don’t follow the rule of thirds or some other similar sharing rule.

Rule #5: You should tweet or post a certain number of times per week

There are rules for how many times you should post on your social profiles, how long they should be, with or without photos, on what time of the day or days of the week you should post and so on. The truth is that all these practices are based on other people’s testing and on what worked for their situation. It’s ok to use them to start your own testing, but don’t settle with these numbers.

Test, analyze your results and iterate. Share content only if you add value, not to follow a checklist.

If you don’t have what to share for a few days don’t worry. Is better to stay quiet than to post something for the sake of posting.

Rule #6: Develop a social media marketing plan and stick to it

Developing a plan is crucial to your success. But these days everything is changing so fast, especially in social media, that what you planned today may be obsolete tomorrow.
So, I’d say: craft your plan, know your objectives but stay flexible enough so that you can adapt quickly to any unexpected event.

Rule #7: Have your posts 100% optimized for every network you want to share it on

Every social network has its particularities and your content should reflect that you understand these differences. You need to adapt your posts to the platform you use to reach your audience. Or, should you?

Take a look at Zara, for example. They post the same content on all their social channels. On Facebook, for example, they could’ve added a little more explanation for the picture, but they choose not to. And it’s not out of laziness, it’s because that’s how they connect to their users. Letting the images tell the story.

This bold approach made Zara one of the 20 most liked companies on Facebook. So, how can you break the rules in a creative and efficient way to stand out and get millions of followers like Zara did?

Rule #8: Always be part of the online social media conversation in your niche

Social listening is a very powerful practice that can help you identify conversations among your customers or prospects that you should partake in. Whether they love your products or they’re sharing their disappointment about your brand, you can track and join in these conversations to clear things up.
But you should not obsessively engage in every conversation on every platform or website. It’s more productive to participate only if you have something valuable to say and can add substance to the conversation.

Rule #9: Use perfect grammar

Apart from social media rules that you can refuse to obey, here are some grammar rules that you can go against in order to have more relaxed social media conversations.

However, it’s important for your brand’s online reputation to use proper grammar. Only break these rules to further clarify your message and to add a casual and familiar tone when talking to your audience (if it’s appropriate for your brand and niche).

These are 9 rules that you can and should break to make your brand stand out in a crowded social media universe. But remember that there is a right way and a wrong way to break the rules. Choose wisely and remain the hero of the story.

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The 29 Most Common Social Media Rules: Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette?

For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis.

It’s hard to know which rules exist, which ones are real, and which ones are okay to break or follow.

I’d love to help shed some light here so that you can go forth and share confidently.

The 29 most common social media rules

After digging into a bunch of research from thought leaders and influencers, I found there seemed to be a set of social media rules that most could agree on. Here’s the list of 29 social media rules most commonly mentioned by the pros.

(Thanks to HubSpot, TollFreeForwarding and Gryffin, Rebekah Radice [1] [2],Chris Brogan, and Outbound Engine for their great resources and inspiration on these social media rules.)

For all social networks

1. Share several times a day, but space out your posts every few hours.

2. Respond to all comments as quickly as you can.

3. Know the art of the hashtag. 1 hashtag is fine. 10 hashtags are not.

4. Always keep the 80/20 rule! Entertain and inform your audience first, sell to them second.

5. Use first person plural when talking about your company brand (We, Us).

For Twitter

6. Don’t automatically direct message people that follow you.

7. Don’t use all 140 characters. Give people room to retweet with a reply.

8. Don’t hijack another company’s hashtag.

9. Don’t buy followers.

10. Don’t stuff your tweets with keywords.

For Facebook

11. Don’t Like your own post.

12. Don’t post or tag photos of fans, customers, or employees without permission.

13. Don’t tag people or pages that aren’t relevant to your post.

14. Don’t ask for Likes, Comments, or Shares.

LinkedIn

15. Personalize your connection requests. Tell them WHY you’re connecting.

16. Once connected, send a “welcome” message.

17. Don’t join groups and immediately start selling yourself.

18. Don’t ignore the more professional tone of the network.

Google+

19. Always +mention users when commenting on their posts.

20. When sharing a post, always add your own commentary to it first.

21. Share to Circles to target your content.

22. Use Google+ formatting for your text—bold, italics, and strikethrough.

Pinterest

23. Don’t neglect to provide good descriptions for your pins.

24. Always link back to the original source and give credit.

25. Don’t use images that have nothing to do with your clickthrough content to get more pins or clicks.

26. Don’t pin just your own material.

Instagram

27. Don’t ask people to follow you or use hashtags like #tagsforlikes – it’s unprofessional.

28. Don’t overgram. No one likes their feed filled up with one user.

29. Use hashtags for your brand appropriately. The golden number of hashtags is 11.

Rules for all social networks

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Share several times a day, but space out your posts every few hours. 

Research has shown that bursts—moments when you flood your followers’ timelines with several updates sent back-to-back-to-back—are one of the most significant factors in unfollowing. To combat this, you can use a social media scheduling tool like Buffer to space out your posts.

Respond to all comments as quickly as you can

A social media study found that 53 percent of users who tweet at a brand expect a response in under 60 minutes. Twitter is the most real-time of the social networks. Timely responses are imperative on Twitter and highly encouraged everywhere else.

Know the art of the hashtag. 1 hashtag is fine. 10 hashtags are not.

How many hashtags is too many? The Next Web recommends 1-3 hashtags per post, across all platforms. It’s a good rule of thumb to start with; you might find your mileage varies depending on the different networks.

From what we’ve been able to research and learn about hashtags,

• Twitter – 2 hashtags seems to be best
• Facebook – hashtags may actually decrease engagement
• Instagram – 11 or more hashtags per post gets the most engagement
• Pinterest – hashtags are not recommended

The takeaway here: Hashtags are great for added engagement and visibility, almost all the time. The ideal number of hashtags seems to vary greatly. Feel free to test and iterate for yourself.

Always keep the 80/20 rule! Entertain and inform your audience first, sell to them second

We’ve covered the many different ratios you might try for your social media sharing—the 4-1-1 rule, the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, etc.—and one thing they all have in common is an emphasis on sharing others’ content more than your own.

For many, this will be a great strategy. For our social media sharing at Buffer,we’ve tried the opposite advice, sharing 90 percent of our own content and 10 percent from others. We’ve yet to see a negative impact on engagement.

Use first person plural when talking about your company brand (We, Us)

For example:

When speaking as the company, first-person plural is best. When speaking as your personal brand, first-person singular (I, me) would be more natural.

Social media rules for Twitter

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Don’t automatically direct message people that follow you.

There’s a time and a place for good social media automation, and direct-messaging new followers doesn’t appear to be it. A popular practice in the earlier days of Twitter, auto-DMs now are easily identified by users as inauthentic messaging.

Don’t use all 140 characters. Give people room to retweet with a reply.

The ideal length of a tweet is 71 to 100 characters, exactly for this reason. If a person chooses to manually retweet you (copying the text from your tweet and typing RT: at the beginning), they may want to add a personal note or message to your original tweet. Keeping the length below the 140-character limit makes this easier.

Don’t hijack another company’s hashtag.

HubSpot has some great advice for this one:

When you see companies create well-performing hashtags, don’t hop on their hashtag train to promote irrelevant content — it devalues their hashtag and, as a result, your brand.

Don’t buy followers. 

Betaworks data scientist Gilad Lotan ran an experiment on this exact rule, paying $5 for 4,000 Twitter followers. He found that doing so felt quite off—sleazy even. Still, the final outcome for the experiment actually led to positive Twitter growth for Gilad.

I do believe that acquiring just the right amount, as much as I hate to write it, may have a positive long-term effect on acceleration of growth and visibility.

This would make for an interesting ethics debate, right? Just because a strategy works on social media, does that mean it’s okay to use? How do social media rules and etiquette factor in? Buying twitter followers feels a bit underhanded and unethical to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Don’t stuff your tweets with keywords.

How would your tweet sound if you were to say it face-to-face to a friend or coworker? This seems to be a good measure of the right balance of keywords.

Social media rules for Facebook

Don’t Like your own post.

Liking your own post has the potential to surface the content again in the News Feed (first when you publish, and again when you Like) and to kick off engagement from others. That being said, doing so tends to send a rather desperate, unsavory message to those who catch on.

Don’t post or tag photos of fans, customers, or employees without permission.

Many sites recommend getting written permission before going ahead with posting and tagging photos of others on your Facebook page. There’s likely to be very valid privacy concerns that could arise if brands aren’t careful in this area.

Don’t tag people or pages that aren’t relevant to your post.

People and pages who are tagged in Facebook updates receive notification of being mentioned; some folks use this as a simple hack for getting added attention on the content they publish. Again, this is one of those tactics that might work well yet doesn’t feel particularly great.

Don’t ask for Likes, Comments, or Shares.

Previously, the social media rule for this one was: Only ask people to like your status if you are doing a poll, i.e. “Like this post if you’re a dog person, share it if you’re a cat lover.” Asking for likes, comments, or shares is one of the factors that the Facebook News Feed considers when it decides what content to show. Promotional text like this lowers the visibility of your content.

Social media rules for LinkedIn

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Personalize your connection requests. Tell them WHY you’re connecting.

Personal requests tend to be noticed and appreciated—and accepted!—moreso than a simple generic request.

Once connected, send a “welcome” message.

In my experience, this one happens quite rarely—although the effect can be great! If you get a lot of LinkedIn requests, this might not scale too well; however, it’s possible to do this for a few connections at a time or for the occasions when you connect with influencers.

Don’t join groups and immediately start selling yourself.

Groups are a great way to connect with others in LinkedIn (one of the benefits of Groups is that you can direct message any fellow group member, whether you’re connected or not). One of the best rules for LinkedIn groups is to respect the group dynamics. Share and engage before selling.

Don’t ignore the more professional tone of the network.

This one speaks to an even greater social media rule: Tailor your content and message for each specific network. LinkedIn in particular has a targeted demographic of business people and professionals. Content on the network does best when it fits that tone.

Social media rules for Google+

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Always +mention users when commenting on their posts.

This helps the original authors follow along with the thread, and it’s a polite way to give attribution and credit where it’s due.

When sharing a post, always add your own commentary to it first.

Google+ posts are a real joy to read and write; they’re often more like mini blog posts than social media updates. The way that users compose these messages has a really neat art and science to it. One way I’ve noticed is that many people add their own thoughts about a topic first, followed by a horizontal line break (a series of connected dashes, usually), then the headline and link to the related article.

Share to Circles to target your content.

Sharing to a Circle is like Direct Messaging a particular group of people. Only those in the Circle will receive the notification and can view the content. It’s a useful way to share targeted content with a compartmentalized group of followers.

Use Google+ formatting for your text.

Here’s a quick guide on how to style your posts in Google+.

Social media rules for Pinterest

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Don’t neglect to provide good descriptions for your pins.

Sometimes, in quickly pinning different images it’s easy to leave out the pin description. This is one of the key ways that new users can discover your pins, provided you compose a good description that’s rich in keywords.

Always link back to the original source and give credit.

Whenever we talk about images on the Buffer blog, one of the key areas to keep in mind is proper attribution. Images tend to get passed around lots online, so it’s always best to track back to the original source so that they get credit for their creation.

Pinning from the original source, rather than somewhere that syndicated or republished the image, is always best.

Don’t use images that have nothing to do with your clickthrough content to get more pins or clicks.

This Pinterest hack may bring in clicks, but they’re not likely to be valuable, sticky traffic nor are the new visitors to leave with a very good impression of their experience.

Don’t pin just your own material.

Instead, you can create individual boards that highlight your blog posts or content. Beyond that, pin from a wide variety of sources.

Here’s an example of what we’ve done for our marketing tips posts from the Buffer blog.

Social media rules for Instagram

Which Ones Are Real? Which Ones Are Breakable?

Don’t ask people to follow you or use hashtags like #tagsforlikes.

Similar to to Facebook, asking for Likes is not recommended, although instead of impacting your photo’s visibility (there’s no News Feed algorithm for Instagram), the impact is likely to be felt on your brand’s professionalism.

Don’t overgram. No one likes their feed filled up with one user.

In our research into ideal frequency for social media, Instagram was one that didn’t have as concrete of a standard. One research study found that majorbrands post an average of 1 to 2 times per day. At the same time, brands that post 10 or more times per day continued to see positive engagement growth even as frequency grew.

Use hashtags for your brand appropriately. The golden number of hashtags is 11.

As mentioned above, you can often get away with more hashtags on Instagram than any other social network. Track Maven’s study of Instagram hashtags found that interactions were at the highest on images when 11 or more hashtags were used.

The best part about this recommendation is that the data comes from a set of users with 1,000 or fewer followers—a group that likely includes small businesses and those just diving in to Instagram. In other words, hashtags could be your best bet for growing a fast following on Instagram.

Summary

Which of social media’s unwritten rules have you learned of in your experience? Which ones do you subscribe to? Which ones do you break?

It’d be amazing to hear about your experience with some of these. Feel free to leave your thoughts here in the comments.

Image sources: The Noun Project, Blurgrounds, Get Refe, Pablo

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