Any piece of content produced comprises various elements such as the ideas as a foundation, text to convey this idea in words, images, and videos to represent the idea visually. In the constantly developing content world, the need for focusing on every element is critical to the success of the content but today, the visual communication of content overshadows the importance of the text.
Visuals have their own language and our brains translate them for understanding so, when we see a visual with inspiring graphics, our mind is able to retain that concept better than text. Visual content includes images, videos, GIFs, bar charts, graphs, infographics, and many others and as a content creator, you should know how to incorporate them in your content.
Importance of visual communication
In the content world, this is one of the most quoted phrases, “An image is worth a thousand words”. And this is so true! You write a long paragraph to convey a message but if the same message is shown in the form of a picture, it is more appealing and it draws the attention of the audience more than that lengthy text.
Today, when your audience has very little time to read your blogs, diverting your focus to produce more and more visual content is a good idea so that you are able to deliver the message in less time with more visual empowerment and attraction. With the rapidly developing graphic design industry, the audience’s choice of colors, layouts, and designs is also evolving so they prefer investing their time in strong visuals delivering the message. This trend is strengthening to such an extent that visuals with good graphics go viral even with an average quality of text in it. So, often you see a picture with little or no text, or weak text, having a high level of audience engagement.
Go for visuals or not?
This choice depends on three factors:
- Audience
- Topic
- Platform
The audience’s preference is the most critical factor to be considered because the content is being produced for the audience and if it does not like the medium being used i.e. text or image then, all your efforts go wasted. So, if your audience comprises young professionals, keep in mind these people don’t have time but they are enthusiastic and love to watch videos and pictures, so crafting such content for this group will be a better idea.
Similarly, the Topic of the content also decides what kind of communication medium to use. Topic requiring more elaboration and serious debate requires more text with a few images while topics for entertaining the audience need to be more visual and should be presented in the form of images, videos, or GIFs.
Choice of the platform also guides what kind of content to compose. Although, more and more visual content is being promoted on all platforms, some are more visual as compared to others and hence, you have to tailor your posts according to each platform’s requirements.
Check out the difference
Let’s check out how different platforms communicate the messages visually.
Facebook is a social networking platform for both personal or professional interactions. Posts on Facebook are both textual and visual with visuals preferred over text. So, if you are a blogger doing some serious blogging, you need to create high-quality textual posts with some good visuals as featured images and videos for higher click through rates. If you are posting only images, they too must contain little text too. So, Facebook is a platform where text still holds importance for communicating with audiences and increasing their engagement.
Instagram is a photo & video sharing mobile and desktop app, providing a visual sharing experience to its users. It allows users to interact with their followers by posting images, videos up to a limit of 1 min and IGTV videos up to 10 minutes with larger accounts with a time limit of up to 1 hour. Instagram has brought a revolution in the visual communication & graphic design industry because of the different visuals editing features it offers like a boomerang, layout, carousel, and many filters. Due to intense competition among the visual posts, the ones with high-quality graphics get more audience engagement. The visuals are captioned with very little text as description and are promoted among the Instagram community through Hashtags. So, Instagram is a perfect platform for you if you want to be a microblogger with good ideas and skills for creating high-quality visuals.
Google+
Google+ is an internet-based social networking website that displays both textual and visual content in a very balanced way. Bloggers and businesses have a very good opportunity to create and share their posts on Google+ and increase traffic to their sites as the links on Google+ take the audience to the host site. Here, your followers can like your posts and comment on them. You have an amazing opportunity to be discovered by the world so inserting attractive images can help you expand your community. Unlike Instagram, it offers empowerment to long textual content too.
Snapchat
Much similar to Instagram, Snapchat is also a picture and video sharing app intended for strong visual communication. It is a great place for people with photoblogs to interact with their audience.
LinkedIn is a professional network with both text and visual playing their part. Texts can be lengthy or short, accompanied by catchy featured images.
Twitter is a social networking website, with the tweets of current affairs and trending news bringing the most traffic and audience to it. Other than these, blogs and businesses use this platform to advertise. It offers space for short texts and sharing your website content and blogs as tweets. Images and videos still hold significance with lengthy posts so here too, it is important to insert good quality visuals.
Pinterest is a highly recommended visual communication platform, giving an extensive opportunity to the businesses and websites to get discovered by the target audience, resulting in high click-through rates and increased sales. So, set high quality and catchy visual for your post and get discovered by the whole world within no time.
Tumblr
An amazing microblogging social networking site to share blogs with multimedia and other visual content, thus making the blogs more reachable and attractive. So, if you don’t want to write much and can produce high-quality visual content, Tumblr is one of the best visual communication platforms for getting discovered.
The challenges we have…
The importance of images in the content is evident from the contemporary trends being followed on all visual communication platforms so, it does not only discover an opportunity for you to grow your audience using high-quality graphics, but it also poses a challenge to create catchy visuals to reach your target audience which isn’t something everyone can do easily. Therefore, before you decide to select any particular platform for reaching your target audience, do make an assessment of what your audience demands and how you have to make a visual communication strategy to craft and manage the content in the long-term.
So, finally?
Creating an effective post with high quality visuals and the amount of text based on the platform you are choosing, can make you win your target audience. Having complete knowledge of the requirements of each platform is the key to successful content production and management.
