When it comes down to social media that old saying – which goes something like “a picture is worth a thousand words” – has never been truer. Nailing social media graphic design is extremely important in capturing people’s attention. Facebook posts that have images or graphics will see twice as much engagement as opposed to those without. In addition, Tweets with images will attract 150% more retweets.
Your visual cortex may be a tiny part of your brain however it processes visual information almost 60 000 times quicker than your brain processes words. When individuals scan their social media feeds, they make extremely fast decisions about what they’ll pay attention to. Your content needs to catch the eye of your target audience almost instantaneously, or they’ll scroll right on past.
The absolute best way to slow the scroll — and thus encourage engagement — is to include graphic design in your social media post. A recent study found that posts with powerful images average 94% more views as opposed to posts without them.
However, graphics don’t merely increase audience engagement. These boost understanding and retention as well. Statistics have demonstrated that people recall information 65% more effectively when it’s paired with a pertinent image.
Understand Which Social Media Images Resonate With Your Audience
Before you begin allocating time and resources to creating new images, you have to figure out what kind of visual content your audience finds most engaging. Pull historical social media data for each network that your brand is active on.
Single out the content which has driven the greatest engagement and reach. Summarise the image attributions that your most successful social content shares. Identify patterns across social networks and utilise this information to make informed decisions in the future.
Choose a time range that’s sufficiently wide to get a good sample of data. After this, analyse which content performs well, either on the page or – alternatively – as an exported CSV.
Play On Emotion
One of the most cost-effective ways of putting together content that resonates with your audience is to leverage the power of emotions. Through connecting with your audience emotionally, you will probably make a long-lasting impact.
Humour, specifically, is a great way to spark an emotional response from viewers, making it far more likely that they will comment, share as well as remember the visual (and thus the message behind it). This tactic works irrespective of the industry that you are in.
Visual Content Is Easily Understood
When it comes to understanding, our minds prefer visuals as they communicate more information, a lot more effectively. A total of 90% of the information that is sent to the brain is visual. Images are processed 600 000 times faster as opposed to text. Believe it or not humans are biologically wired to manage the world around them visually. Human brains process visual cues in just a quarter of a 4 second.
With your brain pre-wired to explain relationships between objects, visuals allow for nearly instant comprehension with minimal effort. In addition, your brain interprets visuals faster than it is able to process language.
With the average consumer’s attention span at eight seconds or less, visuals assist your customers with understanding your message quickly.
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Graphic design is a super career to get into as you’ll always have plenty to work. The very first step on your path to becoming an advanced graphic designer is to study our Advanced Graphic Designer. Follow this link to find out more.