How Your Brand Can Stand Out With Visual Content

Social media makes it unavoidable: It’s important to engage in the conversation, or you’ll get lost in the crowd. By using a wide variety of imagery and visual techniques, you can represent your brand and get more attention and traffic.

All social media channels, even those that were more text-based, are now focusing on the visual component, thanks to what’s being called the Instagram Effect. Instagram is almost totally visual, relying on images to communicate its message.

Images have grown in size on Facebook, and videos now play automatically. Kissmetrics reports that Facebook “photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.”

Even if you’re not a naturally visual business, such as a design or travel company, there are many ways to visualize the value of your brand, products, and services. There are visual opportunities for everyone to participate in the explosion of visual growth.

Here are four ways to create your visual content for social media:

Tell Stories With Images

When telling a story, think of a designated period of time and how to capture what’s happening. For example, it could be a product launch, a new building, a website makeover, a trade show or conference, a fundraising event, or the development of a prototype.

Whatever you choose to showcase, document it with a sequence of photos or videos. By chronicling the timeline of events, you’re sharing a behind-the-scenes peek and adding visual intrigue and engagement to ordinary processes.

Entertain With Memes

By creating memes – an image with simple accompanying text that represents an idea or makes a statement – you’re sharing your company’s personality. What better way to engage with followers than by highlighting your human side?

Use a quotation with striking typography and other graphic enhancements. Look for your quotes in relevant literature, popular culture, educational news, and even old advertisements.

Decades-old classic print ads from various advertising campaigns are great inspiration for your memes. Try Advertising Archives’ selection for inspiration to see how some brands managed to inspire and entertain without boasting or simply spewing out company slogans.

Information-Rich Infographics 

The popularity of infographics is due to its concentration of valuable information that is formatted to tell a story. Having all that data compiled in one place is a visual feast for the data hungry.

Infographics can illustrate an abstract concept with humor, distinction, and imagination. With one post, you save your followers hours of gathering information on a specific topic.

Piktochart and Easelly are great places to start for do-it-yourself infographics. With ready-made templates and walk-through steps, you can turn your research into a customized visual story.

Online Presentations

Presentations continue to stand out as visually persuasive content. Thanks to the growing number of free online presentation tools, showcasing your own creativity and knowledge is easier than ever.

Besides the well-known Microsoft PowerPoint online, there is also Slideshare, Prezi, Haiku Deck, and Google Slides. With these tools, you can create a visual strategy that fuses art and copy to form a compelling presentation.

To get the best results, start your content creation so both your visual images and text work together to promote a unified concept. The end product should be more than just tacked-on graphics to your documents.

Reinvent the slideshow with a rich digital experience for your audience that’s easy to share across your social media platforms.

When sharing your visual creations, remember not to post every single image across all of your networks. Each social media platform has different image dimensions as well as unique community expectations. Make sure that your message is expressed in a format that reflects each platform’s identity.

For every visual you share, include something that will make your brand recognizable, such as a watermark or logo. By expressing your brand with visual creative planning, you will build trust and stand out from your competition.