When interacting with people, first impressions are always the most important as they will affect your receptiveness in every interaction. The same principles apply when we are talking about content.
Every piece of written content has a first impression given by the image that introduces it.
An image has to capture the attention of the targeted audience and also give the interest to engage, click or read more.
Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. (Buzzsumo), on Twitter tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. (BufferApp)
51% of B2B marketers are prioritizing prioritized creating visual content assets in 2016. (Content Marketing Institute) As visual we are also considering Video, Live video, infographics, etc. But a a good picture to begin a piece of content is still up the most importance.
Choosing a picture what are the main things you should think about?
Reflecting Quality
The quality of the image you choose reflects the standard of your company or the professional you are.
There’s not much to say about this. The image you choose must have impeccable quality, in every screen.
If you took a photo to use on you content, make sure is well framed, doesn’t have fingers and is not pixelated in larger screens.
Recognizing Authorship Rights
Every image you see on the internet has rights, so this is probably one of the most important things to consider.
Do you have permissions to use it?
If you are an individual and you are not editing or using it for commercial reasons, you don’t need to worry much, but if you are using them in your business take in considerations the rights or you could get into trouble.
Read this article on 12 Places to find free Images for your content and find out more about images licensed under Creative Commons
Anyway is important to give credit to the authors, every time you can. Think about it has a (very) small thank you.
Using people
It can vary from target to target, but people usually respond better to people.
People photographs always share emotions and that is perceptible by the reader.
How this makes you feel?
SIZE MATTERS
To give the best experience to your readers you should have in mind the correct dimensions you should use.
Look for the specifics of the platform you are using and make sure your image is not far from the recommended pixels and is not in a different proportion.
Considering Akamai reports 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so you also should use a tool like, Tinypng.com to optimize your images, keeping the quality , before upload them into your content.
What worked before
People change, habits change and you have to keep that in mind but, other truth is that change doesn’t happen from day to night.
If you see a type of image getting less and less engagement, maybe is time to try new things…
Relevance and connection
Last but not least, we want to be remembered.
When someone reads something, he or she we will probably remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if you add an relevant image, paired with the content and information, they will retain about 65% of the information three days later. (Brain Rules)
Think about, what value does the image add to the content you are sharing?
Upper Banner image by:
ian dooley