Images capture the imagination. The world’s greatest, most influential writers have captivated children and adults throughout the centuries with spellbinding stories and prose, however many of the world’s most stunning photographs easily speak the equivalent of thousands of words, each telling their own stories. On social media, our own personal stories and opinions are shared each and every day through useful articles, information dumps and status updates; would they, too, benefit from great imagery? Not just the same old copy only content and links? Would there be a stronger human connection and reason to get engaged?
Of course. This is one of the largest reasons why networks like Instagram and Pinterest have taken off in the last few years; people want to share photos and experience a world beyond words, all while experiencing it with others. Twitter has gained traction as one of the fastest growing, most influential networks for businesses of all kinds, but it’s known more for its word limit than it’s use of images in posts. Despite being an easier network to leverage than Facebook or Google+, Twitter does often pose as a difficult network to see immediate successes on; if you’re not part of the community, it can be extremely difficult to breakout without the proper connections and endorsements.
So where do you get these endorsements? Through sharing great content (be it your own or others). One way to showcase this content is through photos, images and graphics; optimizing your images for Twitter might seem a bit irrelevant (you could consider it a primarily text centric, but actually including photos at all serves as a massive booster for your social campaign. On average, posts with images are twice as likely to be retweeted, 90% more likely to be favorited and receive 20% more clicks. As I said before, a picture is worth a thousand words, and with such a limited amount of characters to convey messages to your audience…there can be a disconnect.
If you’re looking for some easy tips to supercharge your Twitter campaign, check out these quick-and-dirty photo tips.
1. Find High-Quality Images
When posting articles and other useful links, be sure to move beyond just the included images in the associated posts. Yes, it might be easiest for you to just upload the image the author already included, however who want’s to look at low-resolution images that may or may not be relevant to your post in the first place? Using resources such as Compfight or Google Images (with reuse rights on, of course) are available for your use. Stock photo websites can be awesome places to find images that aren’t just captivating, but are at higher resolutions; if your images aren’t large enough, there’s the chance they won’t actually be ‘featured’ (full maximized to catch your audience’s attention). As recommended by Danielle Cormier, be sure to use images higher than 800 x 500 (we’re sure a bit smaller than that will be featured, perhaps around 600 x 350 works) and use as many commercial-use images as you can to stay in the clear.
2. Use Overlays
Canva has been a huge player in the social media graphic world lately; if you’re ready to move up from Paint, Canva is certainly the tool for you, saving all your custom graphics and images onto the cloud while providing some great graphic resources for your projects. If you want something even more rudimentary, Spruce serves as a great tool for captioning images or establishing a CTA where you just didn’t have room for one before. No matter the tool you use, optimizing your images with graphics, titles, hashtags and captions can speak to your audience in a way plain copy by itself can’t.
3. Don’t Just Use Images
Counter intuitive? Actually, I’m just saying for you to use the image space for something more than just photos as filler. Mix things up! Previous mentioning tools like Canva and Spruce, try your hand at creating quotes, asking questions, or even other creative uses like word/object searches, contests, analytics, charts, comparisons and more. As I said before, it’s easy to just upload some in-line images into your next post, and people likely know that. Flex your creative juices and think outside the box; wow your visitors and they might just come back for another visit.
