Let a Picture Do the Talking and Watch your Retweets Increase

What’s visual content? In the context of Twitter, it’s an image or video that complements or replaces your text-only tweet. As evidenced by the chart below, tweets that include photos receive 35% more retweets than the same message sans picture.

This recent study conducted by Twitter further demonstrates that adding images increases engagement, generating more clicks, retweets and favorites.

Start Uploading – 3 Ideas

Here are three scenarios where you can start adding more color (literally and figuratively) to your twitter stream and watch your engagement increase:

1 – Employment Brand – Highlight why it’s great to work at your company – and the opportunities to join your team.Oracle got creative with this infographic-style job posting, and then used Twitter to help spread the word about this global opportunity.

2 – Branding and awareness – Use photos to further explain your point or convey complex ideas not easily shared in 140 characters.Using the image to do a step-by-step helps educate your audience and can continue to position you as an expert on a certain topic.

3 – Lead Generation – Promote contests, downloads, events or next steps to engage with you more.

This example from @hubspot’s promotion of their upcoming Inbound conference helps followers get a better idea of what will be presented at the event and how they relate to their business goals.

Not So Fast – Follow These Best Practices

Before you start adding random pictures to every tweet, consider these rules to get the biggest return on your visual content efforts:

Don’t use photos for the sake of photos. Always start by considering your overall marketing strategy, target audience, and then consider how an image can enhance this effort.

Familiarize yourself with how any 3rd party tools you use to schedule posts will affect how the image is posted. For example, only photos using Twitter’s native pic.twitter.com will have the full functionality images offer, including being added to your profile’s photo gallery and automatically displaying images in the Twitter stream. HootSuite Pro and SproutSocial both allow users to post using pic.twitter.com, but not all 3rd party tools offer this functionality.

Twitter images are cropped at a 2:1 ratio, make sure the focus of your image is within this area and no text is cut off. For example, both versions feature the Starbucks storefront so the photo doesn’t lose any meaning when it is cropped in the Twitter stream. For an up-to-date resource on all social media image sizes, see this handy guide courtesy of SproutSocial.

Across Platforms

While we’ve shown you some of the most creative (and time-consuming) examples of visually-supported Twitter content we could find, don’t forget to repurpose these visual assets on other social sites to maximize the return on your time.

This photo that was live-tweeted during an event also serves as an engaging Facebook cover photo:

Although this post focused on Twitter, the same trends are evident on Facebook. Consider adding more variety to your content strategy with visual content like videos, infographics and mini graphics.