New series about Visuals on Social
We live in a visual society, and that means that we as small business owners need to make sure we have appealing visuals as part of our digital marketing strategy. Images & videos on social are what will get people to stop the scroll for your message.
I am going to be covering Visuals on Social the whole month, so that you can feel more comfortable creating the visuals you need for your own business. I am kicking things off with this episode where I start with the basics by laying down some of the foundational things you need to consider.
What we won’t cover
I want to start off by stating the images & videos on social I’m talking about are regular images either you take yourself (or from stock images) or videos that you record (or get from a source online). I’m not referring to AR or VR applications of visuals. That is definitely outside my wheelhouse, and I will leave that to those that know more about it.
I’m also not going to be getting into the hardware or software that you will need to create or customize these visuals in this episode. However, we do have a couple of past episodes that may answer some of those questions for you:
What we will cover in this series
As mentioned above, this episode is going to be laying down some foundational groundwork. Next week, I’m going to be talking about one of my favorite visual editing tools, Canva. The third episode in this series will cover Camtasia & Snagit (both Techsmith products). And the 4th episode with cover Organizing Your Visuals.
Remember the days?
Do you remember back in the day before there were even Business Pages on Facebook? I remember when I joined in 2008, there was a lot of personal text updates where you shared what you were doing in that moment.
While there is still a lot of personal sharing taking place, more than likely that text is accompanied by a visual of some sort. Whether it’s a picture of your kids on the playground or a gif expressing how tired you are, those visuals are more commonplace than just a text update.
Brain Rules shared that only 10% of audible information is retained 3 days later. But if a visual accompanies that information, up to 65% is retained 3 days later. Therefore, it’s a no brainer that businesses need to include these visual cues if we want to be remembered.
Images or Videos?
Pretty much across the board, videos outperform single images. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at organic posts, ads or even which platform you are on. But there is still a lot of power behind still images. Because they are faster to process, you may see higher click rates with an image than a video.
More than likely, original visuals are going to get better results for you than stock sources. Personally, I would rank the levels of engagement from lowest to highest as: stock images, original images, stock video then original videos.
But if you are just getting started creating all this consistent content yourself, then you may want to start with images as they are the easiest to edit. My favorite tool for this is Canva. I like it so much that it is the whole topic for next week’s episode!
Before you take your first photo
As mentioned in the podcast episode, I’ve created checklists for both Social Images and Social Videos. You can grab those below.
Research which images & videos on social work best for your business
Be sure to listen to the episode as I walk you through what you need to do to know which images (and videos) resonate with your audience.
Create your shot list
Once you know the types of visuals to create, then you need to map out what shots you want to take. Look at what you have planned in your Editorial Calendar so you keep the imagery lined up with the content you will be creating.
For Videos
You won’t need a script for images, but you will for your video shoots. And if you want the videos to have a more natural conversation feel, then just create bullet points of what you want to cover in the video.
Don’t forget!
For both photo and video shoots, be sure you capture visuals in both portrait and landscape orientations. The portrait format can be used in Stories, Reels, TikToks and more.
In post production edit your images with any branding features you want to include (we’ll talk more about this next week). And finally, write out your captions for the images as soon as you create them while the intention is still fresh in your mind.
Join our Collaborative!
We’d love to have you join us in our FREE Facebook Group: Chill Collaborative for DIY Marketing. We’ll be continuing this conversation over there.
Until next time….
Dianna
