Understanding our love of visual content

We are experiencing an omnipresent visual domination lately and it’s not expected to change any time soon. So what makes us love visual content?

Whether it’s an image, or a video, people prefer consuming information in a visual form, as it’s more appealing, which leads to an increased engagement. Human beings are naturally drawn to visual content and any type of it may enhance a post’s performance.

Types of visual content

Visual content is a broad term that includes many types of content and the main ones are:

• Images (photography, quotes, memes, screenshots, GIFs, etc)
• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Presentations
• Data graphs

All of them can be very engaging and a mixed use of them can create an effective content marketing strategy, provided that they are used appropriately for each medium, always by taking the audience into consideration.

Visual marketing at the forefront of social media

Social media has significantly relied on visual content, as it manages to grab the users’ attention, while its varying types (eg. the rise of infographics, or the domination of videos) allow it to maintain its popularity.

It is estimated that 63% of social media is made up of images and we assume that this number will only increase in the next years (especially if we also add videos to it).

Every popular social network could attribute its success to the right use of visual content and the way it is offered to the users, in order to create the right balance between words and visuals.

According to BuzzSumo, Facebook updates that include an image had 2.3x more engagementthan those without one.

Moreover, Buffer reported that tweets that contain images lead to 150% more retweets.

Away from Facebook and Twitter, visual appeal has contributed to the rise of new platforms that exclusively rely on visual content, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.

All of them (almost exclusively) focus on images and videos and that’s what makes them so popular, with users loving the simplicity of adding content to them, while brands face the challenge of experimenting with new types of (visual) content to maintain and increase engagement.

Why do we prefer visual content?

According to Jakob Nielsen, users only read 28% of words when visiting a website, with the trend of skimming rather than reading a text becoming prevalent in the online information overload.

Thus, visual content engages with a reader as fast as possible and in the most interesting way and that’s why publishers tend to rely on it even more every year.

The main reasons that we prefer visual content over plain text are:

• It beats our short attention span
• Its simplicity is tempting for any subject
• It manages to engage with the reader and increase the time spent on content
• It manages to communicate complex concepts in an appealing way
• Its appeal increases the chances for the readers to share the content
• It stimulates our minds, especially when it is linked with an emotion

Column Five has created an infographic on the power of visual communication and it presents three main reasons why we love visual content: Appeal, Comprehension, Retention.

Appeal refers to the natural attraction towards visual content, and the way it succeeds even in a short attention span, comprehension is linked to the way our brain translates data to simplify them andretention is related to the memorable experience that visual content tends to create.

How science proves our love for visual content

It has been observed that 90% of the information sent to our brains is visual, with our brainresponding to it 60,000 faster than it does for text.

Thus, our brains need a visual representation to process information faster and create a connection between the visual object and its concept. It’s impressive how the visual perception in our brain makes such a complex task easy and this could also be the scientific reason why an “image is worth a thousand words.”

However, this is not an automatic process, as our brain still needs to rationalise the connection.Visual perception and the calculation of the surroundings rely on the person’s past experiences and memories that could be relevant to the exposure to the specific information.

According to neurobiologist Semir Zeki of the University of London,

“The brain has to actively construct or invent our visual world. Confronted with an overwhelming barrage of visual information, it must sort out relevant features and make snap judgments about what they mean.”

Scene perception, or else the perception of scene gist is the process that our brain performs to perceive the world, from the objects, to the connections they create to our brain, and Monica S. Castelhano and John M. Henderson proved in an experiment in 2008 how even the colours may affect the activation of a scene gist.

Visual content may even become appealing in a way that we cannot explain and this is usually related to the emotions it may evoke.

The magic connection between visual content and emotions

The effectiveness of visual content can be further enhanced with the use of the right emotions.

A visual stimulation can create a visceral reaction by evoking a feeling that may even be subconscious, and that’s what makes it inexplicable to us when trying to understand what makes an image more appealing to us comparing to a similar one.

Visceral reactions form the strongest connections on visual content and they occur from the brain’s part that is also related to our survival instincts, which means that the reaction may be more direct and intense.

Visual content needs to indicate somehow the emotion it aims for, either with the colours, the subject, or even with associations that lead to an easier connection which can elicit the right feeling.

For example, this photo brings out the feelings of security and positivity with both the colours and the people contributing to it, appealing to the idea of the family and the bonding it creates as an association.

Image: negativespace.co

Five tips for amazing visual content

Focus on quality

People appreciate the quality of the visual content, so don’t ignore it when creating visual assets. If you feel that you can’t find the right images, then here are some great free image resources of high quality images.

Image source: Unsplash

Use visual assets in context

Visual content can be very effective as part of a content marketing strategy, but always when it is created and distributed in context, by delivering what your target audience will appreciate. For example, a high quality picture of an airplane you just found may be impressive, but can you add the right text to make it relevant to, say, young mothers you are targeting?

Be consistent with colours and filters

The choice of colours in visual content is very important, as this will associate a series of emotions afterwards, which means that the consistent use of colours should lead to a commitment regarding the emotions you want to elicit with your content.

Image source: Aftercopia

Don’t underestimate typography

Typography can be interpreted as the first visual impression of your text and you want to make sure you engage enough with the reader to keep reading the text.

Thus, typography is a crucial part of your visual content, whether it’s a blog post or even an infographic, and it’s time to focus more on it from now on.

Designer: ligatureloopandstem.com 

Text is still important

Last but (certainly) not least, visual content can boost your content marketing strategy, but it cannot replace the actual written content.

Find the right balance between words and visual content and don’t reduce the quality at any point to both of them.

Image: Gfaught.tumblr.com

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Ace Your Twitter Marketing With 4 Free Tools

Marketing on Twitter Like a Pro For Free

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Today I have some resources to help you with your Twitter marketing for free. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

Building a great community on social media does not have to be an expensive endeavor. In order to manage your time and accounts well you need to have the right tools in place. Twitter is still on top when it comes to attracting new leads and customers quickly. Would you like to harness your Twitter marketing but don’t have a big budget? Use these free resources and let me know how these work for you!

1) Visualize your communities – Bluenod

Easily find top influencers and view your followers on Twitter. Bluenod is a tool that creates a visual social graph that relates to top users and hashtags. Get insights and information on interactions, tweets, and retweets with data on who the best people are to follow in your industry. This smart tool will also help you gain more retweets and provides an easier way to find the best content to share. Signup for free from your account with paid options available with more features.

2) Search and analytics for tweets – Social Bearing

Finding out who is tweeting about your brand can be a lengthy research project. Social Bearing helps you quickly find the latest trending tweets and top users in your target market as well as insights into how you measure up to the competition. Enter names, hashtags, and website URLs for free, and start growing your network right away. A newer geolocation feature is now available for even more results.

3) Create real time Twitter chats – TwChat

Would you like to host your own question and answer session from Twitter? TwChat allows you to create chats based on specific hashtags, which can be bookmarked, tracked, and placed into a calendar. This is a great tool to use to interact with your leads and customers and build a stronger community. Add your team to help collaborate with you with customizable chat rooms, all for free and without software.

4) Group management of your Twitter account – Twilert

Get instant notifications when your brand is being mentioned on Twitter. Twilert will send you an email when your name, keywords or hashtags are shared. This service will help you improve customer relations as well as generate new leads for your business. Try it for 30 days free and help save time on tracking your branding on Twitter.

Hopefully you will find these free Twitter marketing tools useful to your brand strategy. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

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10 Super Simple Social Media Marketing Tips

Think about the last time you searched for a restaurant review before heading to dinner. Have you ever stood in a store aisle, with your phone in hand, traversing the web to see how other people are talking about the products that are lined on the shelves in front of you? Most likely, you’re nodding along. In addition to seeking trustworthy recommendations from friends, most consumers today search online to learn more about brands before committing to a purchase. With technology at our fingertips, the customer journey begins and extends beyond the first encounter with your brand.

Modern technology has empowered companies to develop strategic insight, but this reliance on digital interactions also increases the number of third-party channels that mention your brand. Luckily, an informed social media marketing strategy can help brands develop and protect their major online channels. According to a recent survey conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Ambassador, 67% of Americans say they’re at least a little more likely to purchase a product after a friend or family member shared it via social media or email. Consider how your brand can stay ahead of the curve using these 10 super simple social media tips.

1. Have a plan

Your company’s online presence is the digital equivalent of gathering your friends, fans, and followers into an auditorium to make announcements on a loudspeaker. If you want to keep these conversations alive and convince your audience to come back for more, you’ll need to own the space and present compelling information. With a flexible yet substantial strategy and a dedicated schedule, your team can be equally equipped to direct online conversations about the brand and jump in on trending conversations. Social media outreach should be fun, but it’s also a big opportunity to influence your audience.

2. Produce valuable content

As we progress further into the age of social media, audiences of customers are discovering that some of their favorite brands have authoritative knowledge on an array of topics. Think Whole Foods’ Whole Story blog or General Electric’s GE Reports. Chances are, customers may not be searching for your company’s latest update or feature within their personal social media networks, but they’ll be more willing to engage if your brand offers a thread of compelling content, interesting images, and insightful discussions.

3. Have a consistent brand identity

Don’t let hours of drafting an internal style guide go to waste! Do you have a preferred color scheme or a memorable email signature? Consider how these elements can appear within your social media profiles. A simple way to preserve your brand identity across various social media networks is to use the same username, biographical description, and header image across sites. Syncing platforms like Instagram to display on Facebook and Twitter is a great cohesive approach as well. Madewell, a womenswear retailer, does a great job of threading their brand identity across social media platforms through thematic colors, a signature tone of voice, and expert visual inspiration.The goal is to allow your customers to quickly identify your brand based on the content and voice of your online presence.

4. Keep it simple

Minimize the need to hop into every conversation that’s happening online, by selecting a list of the topics that fall under your brand’s umbrella of expertise. You can simplify each of your social media platforms by dedicating each platform to specific interactions. Perhaps you save customer success stories for Facebook and address customer complaints on Twitter while your Instagram showcases how customers are interacting with your product. We’ve reached an era where companies are encouraged to be everywhere at once, but you must make sure that you’re contributing value to each platform as well.

5. Focus on quality not quantity

The quickest way to upset your audience (and alienate customers) is to overload each of your company’s social media accounts with new posts and updates. As social media sites and users abound, creating one-of-a-kind content is a more reliable way to get a leg up in the quality vs. quantity game. Instead of sticking to a certain number of published posts, commit to tracking the way that your audience engages with compelling content.

6. Diversify your content

Chances are, the ideas that you’ve gathered into a blog post can exist just as easily as an infographic, animated video, or podcast segment. Diverse content allows your brand to showcase information in interesting ways and spark conversations with a range of audiences. Offering a mixed bag of content creates new ways to add value and earn your audience’s trust.

7. Engage with your followers

Your social media accounts shouldn’t be a bulletin board of all of your accomplishments. Instead, think of your platforms as a mosaic that details the experiences you have as a brand and showcases the relationships that you have with your customers and clients. Social media platforms like Instagram are starting to let engagement dictate the user experience. By prioritizing engagement with valuable content from the beginning, your brand can interact with your network while gaining authority within individual feeds.

8. Make it easy to connect

No one likes going on a social media scavenger hunt to track down their favorite brand. Instead of burying social media information on your company website, make sure each platform is listed and linked on all high-traffic pages. Customers should also be able to find adjacent social media profiles from any of your official profiles. This is where having a regularly updated and public profile to comes into play. If you’re in the social media game, don’t make your customers chase you.

9. Tackle negative comments head-on

Once your brand has an established online presence, you’ll open a pathway for various customer interactions, including customer grievances and negative comments. It’s never a good idea to let negative comments sit in your mentions or allow customer questions to go unanswered. Develop a standard way to respond to these conversations in a transparent, prompt, and respectful way. Being proactive in times of online tension is a responsibility that comes along with developing a vocal and visible presence on social media.

10. Measure your results

We’ll let you in on a not-so-little secret: your social media channels can drive revenue. Of course, they’re great for friendly conversations with customers but thanks to the magic of modern marketing, you can attract leads and monitor their engagement with specific pieces of content. To get started, determine the desired outcomes for your content and measure success based on the progress toward this goal. Are followers, subscribers, downloads, conversions or email captures the most beneficial for you? Decide which platform will nourish this goal and cater your schedule to incorporate this metric.

Succeeding at Social

Since today’s customers have grown accustomed to interacting with companies in a variety of realms, modern brands are judged beyond their tangible products, speedy service, or in-person expereiences. Each touch point that your customer encounters on their journey should contribute to a cohesive and informative representation of your brand that invites them to interact.

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Google Analytics: A guide to confusing terms

Google Analytics is a hugely useful and in-depth tool for measuring and monitoring your website’s performance, as long as you can learn its language.

After setting up Google Analytics on your site for the first time, it can be hard work to navigate your way through all the different terms referring to parts of your site or the activities users carry out on it – especially when so many of them sound similar.

What’s the difference between a ‘session’ and a ‘pageview’? Are ‘users’ and ‘visitors’ the same thing? How does your site’s ‘bounce rate’ differ from its ‘exit rate’? Does ‘time on page’ really reflect what it says it does?

If you’ve wondered something like this at any point while staring down a mass of analytics for your site, worry not. We’ve put together a handy guide to break down the meanings and uses of some key but confusing terms on Google Analytics, and how they differ from each other.

Quick Links

• Bounce Rate
  • Sticky content
• Clicks
  • Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
• Entrances
• Events
• Exit Page
• Exit Rate (% Exit)
• Hits
• Impressions
• Landing or Entrance Page
• Page Views
  • Unique Page Views
  • Pages/Session or Average Page Depth
• Sessions
  • Average Session Duration
• Time on Page
• Users, Visitors or Traffic?
  • New Visitor
  • Returning Visitor
  • Traffic Source
• Types of Traffic
  • Direct Traffic
  • Organic Search Traffic
    • Organic Search Keywords
  • Paid Search Traffic
  • Referral Traffic

Bounce Rate

Google’s definition:

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

This could be because they lost interest, were confused, or had already found the information they were looking for.

Individual pages have bounce rates as well as the site as a whole. A bounce rate for a page is based on all sessions that begin with that page and end without the user navigating to any other pages on the site.

A high bounce rate can be an indicator of problems, or it can indicate that for whatever reason, visitors aren’t finding anything on the site that entices them to stay longer, read more, or search for more content.

A site that people spend a long time visiting and interacting with is often referred to as ‘sticky’. This article looks at ways to reduce bounce rates.

For more, listen to Avinash Kaushik on the power of bounce rate, or “I came, I puked, I left”:

Not to be confused with: Exit Rate

Clicks

Clicks is a metric that appears on Google’s SEO Reports, which you can set up for your site to monitor your visibility in search results and how that translates into visitors to your site. As it says on the tin, the number of clicks on your SEO report records the number of times that people have clicked on a URL to your website in search results. This does not count clicks on paid AdWords search results, which are recorded separately in AdWords reports.

Clickthrough Rate, or CTR, is a number calculated by dividing the number of clicks to your site by the number of impressions (which records how many times it was seen) and multiplying by 100. This will tell you what proportion of users who see your site in search results actually click through to it.

Not to be confused with: Impressions or Hits

Entrances

Google Analytics records an entrance for each page that a user begins a new session on. So the number of entrances given for a specific page shows how many users began their session with that page.

Not to be confused with: Landing or Entrance Page

Events

An event on Google Analytics is a type of hit which tracks user interactions with content like downloads, mobile ad clicks, Flash elements and video plays.

Events on Google Analytics give insight into a range of user activities that are taking place across your site, and with a little bit of technical know-how, you can set up custom events to track all kinds of user behaviours that aren’t normally visible in Analytics.

Not to be confused with: Hits

Exit Page

The opposite of a landing page, an exit page on Google Analytics refers to the last page a user accesses before their session ends or they leave the site. The Exit Pages section of Google Analytics therefore allows you to see which pages people most frequently end their sessions on or leave the site after viewing.

Google Analytics has difficulty calculating the amount of time users spend on an exit page because there is no next page to help it judge when the user left that page. This issue impacts the accuracy ofaverage time on page and average session duration figures.

Not to be confused with: Landing or Entrance Page or Exit Rate

Exit Rate (shown on Google Analytics as % Exit)

This figure shows how often users end their session or leave the site after viewing that particular page. The exit rate is calculated by dividing the number of ‘exits’ made from the page by the number of pageviews it has, to determine what proportion of visitors to that page leave it after visiting.

A page with a high exit rate may not necessarily have a high bounce rate, since users might be coming to that page from elsewhere in the site before exiting. However, a page with a low exit rate is likely to also have a low bounce rate, since users must be going on to other pages on the site before they leave.

Not to be confused with: Bounce Rate or Exit Page

Hits

In web terms, a hit is a request to a web server for a file like a webpage, image or JavaScript. In Google Analytics, hits are an overarching term for a variety of website interactions. Page views andevents, for example, are both types of hit. A session is simply a collection of hits from one user, grouped together.

Google Analytics uses hits to determine when and how a user is interacting with a webpage. So if no hits are sent, the user is assumed to be inactive. The countdown to the end of a user’s session begins from their last hit. After thirty minutes with no new hits, the session automatically ends.

Not to be confused with: Clicks, Page Views or Events

Impressions

In Google’s SEO Reports, impressions records how many times a URL to your site was viewed by a user in search results. This does not count impressions by paid AdWords search results, which are recorded separately in AdWords reports.

By calculating clicks on those URLs as a percentage of impressions, Google Analytics can tell you the Click-Through Rate of your URLs that appear in search results. This appears in your SEO Report under CTR.

Not to be confused with: Page Views

Landing or Entrance Page

‘Landing Page’ and ‘Entrance Page’ are both used by Google to refer to the first page a user accesses (or ‘lands’ on) at the beginning of a session. The Landing Pages section of Google Analytics therefore allows you to view the pages through which users most often arrive on the site, and their statistics.

Not to be confused with: Exit Page or Entrances

Page Views

Page Views (also called screen views for mobile) are the total count of how many times any user lands on an individual page on your website. This includes repeatedly landing on the same page during one session, so if a user refreshes the page, this counts as an additional page view on your site.

‘Unique page views’ is a number that will tell you how many times a page was accessed at least once during a session. In other words, it doesn’t count multiple views of a page by the same user in the same session, instead treating them as a single view.

Pages per session, also called Average Page Depth, is the average number of pages viewed by each user during one session. On Google Analytics, this metric includes repeated views of a single page by the same user.

Not to be confused with: Hits or Impressions

Session(s)

A session is a measure of the amount of time a user spends actively engaging with your website. Session length is calculated from the moment a user arrives on your site until 30 minutes of inactivity have elapsed. Every new action that a user performs will reset the clock on when that session will ‘expire’.

The only exception to this is at midnight, at which point all sessions for that day are considered to have ended and a fresh session will begin, even if that user has been active throughout.

Average Session Duration calculates the average length of a user’s session by dividing the session duration by the number of sessions. However, there is a problem with this calculation: Google cannot calculate the time spent on an exit page because there is no next page for it to use as a marker. This can drastically throw off the accuracy of the average session duration, especially in the case ofbounces where the session consists of a single page, and no session duration can be calculated at all.

Not to be confused with: Time on Page

Time on Page

If you look at the Google Analytics for individual pages on your site, you can see the average amount of time that a user spent on that page, as well as the amount of time that users spend, on average, on any one page of your site. This figure can be deceptive, however.

Google has no way of measuring the time a user spent on the last page of your website that they viewed, because it uses the next page they access to calculate how long they spent on the previous one. On the last page of a session, there is no next page and so the time on that page is recorded as 0.

Google does correct for this issue somewhat, calculating average time on page by dividing the time on page by the number of page views minus the number of exits from the site. The problem is, this still means the time on the exit page isn’t accounted for, so bear that in mind when looking at these figures.

Not to be confused with: Session Duration

Users, Visitors or Traffic?

These three terms are all ways of referring to the people who access your site. Google uses the words user and visitor interchangeably in different places, both to refer to an individual person who comes to your site. A new visitor is someone who comes to your site without having been there before, while a returning visitor is someone who has been to your site previously.

Traffic is an overall term to refer to the volume of users accessing your website. A traffic source is any place from which people are directed to your site, such as a search engine, social network or other website.

Types of traffic:

Direct traffic

Visitors to your site are classed as direct traffic when they access your site via a bookmark, or by entering its URL straight into their browser’s address bar. When viewing Traffic Sources on Google Analytics, the source for direct traffic is shown as ‘(direct)’.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic traffic is the name given to the amount of users who find your website ‘organically’ through search results, as opposed to via a paid ad, clicking a link on another site, or from a bookmark they already have saved. Organic search keywords can allow you to see which search terms are helping users to find your site, as well as the kind of things they are looking for when they access it.

Paid Search Traffic

Paid traffic is the amount of visitors to your site who came there via Google Adwords ads, paid search keywords and other online ad campaigns. With Paid Traffic on Google Analytics, you can track all traffic from paid sources in one place, analyse user behaviour and gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Referral Traffic

A referral is a visitor to your site who is sent there, or referred, from a direct link on another site.Referral traffic is therefore the general term for the amount of people who are referred to your site from elsewhere on the web.

Rebecca Sentance is a Writer at ClickZ.

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