There’s no denying that capturing your social media audience’s attention is becoming harder every day. With so much content consistently being pushed out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms, it’s an all out competition between brands to engage with customers. In order to stand out from the crowd, brands MUST include a visual component to their posts. In fact, posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Here are a few image ideas you might want to think about when planning your future content strategy.

Photos of Products and Services

These are simple photos of your brand’s product or services; everything from photos of your store, projects you’ve completed, new items in store, food on your menu, etc. They can be taken from your cellphone or camera, or taken professionally (we recommend). It’s always great to have a folder of these photos on hand because they can be used with almost any post you push out.

Stock Photos

If your company doesn’t have a product or service that can be photographed, don’t worry! Stock photos can always be used to add that image component to your content strategy. We love using stock photo websites like Unsplash and Pexels to grab free photos. Stock photos don’t have to be boring, either. Try spicing them up by adding text over top to create a quote photo that relates to your business. These can easily be created on Photoshop or Canva.

Gifs/Memes

When it’s time to add a little humor to the mix, opt for a gif or meme. For example; If you are a clothing store, post a fun gif about online shopping. If you are a recruiter, post a funny meme about finding candidates. Anything that relates to your business and audience will likely go over well. One place we often visit to find gifs is Giphy, and when we need to customize a gif, we create our own.

User Generated Photos

You may be wondering “what the heck is user generated content?”. User generated content is when an unpaid contributor, or “fan”, creates and uploads content that promotes a brand. In this situation, that contributor may upload a photo of the meal they ate at your restaurant, or wearing the new jacket they bought from your store. Taking advantage of user generated content is a unique approach to increasing engagement with your audience and takes little-to-no work on your end. Not only is this a great way to show your customers you appreciate them, but 70% of people trust images taken from ‘people like them’ over brand created images. To find images that your customers take, you’ll have to search through your business’s #hashtag, location, and tagged photos. Once you find the photo you want to use, create an engaging caption that includes credit to the user who originally posted the photo.

Multiple Choice

These photos are a fun way to have your audience give you feedback on your products, and can be easily created in Canva. If you are a retailer, you can put a few products side-by-side and see which one is the fan favorite. If you’re a restaurant, you can make a collage of menu items to find out which one your customers enjoy the most. Just make sure you label each photo with A, B, C, or D so your audience can give you a quick and easy answer!

 

Whether you choose to use one of these image ideas or all five, we promise it’s better than no image at all.

Which of these do you plan on adding to your content strategy? Let us know!