In Love With Visuals
I enjoyed this piece — Understanding our love of visual content — on the importance of visuals in communications. Not too heavy. Some persuasive factoids. A good reminder for us writers to pay attention to images.
And I’ll confess right now, The Agitator does a poor job at using visuals. Or at least I do. Roger generally manages to stick a graphic or image of some kind in his posts.
Some of the factoids …
- 63% of social media consists of images
- Facebook updates that include an image have 2.3x more engagement
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets
- We only read 28% of the words when visiting a website
- 90% of the information sent to our brains is visual, and our brain responds to it 60,000 faster than it does for text.
See, I’m practising.
OK, why does visual content work so well? Says this article:
- It beats our short attention span
- Its simplicity is tempting for any subject
- It manages to engage with the reader and increase the time spent on content
- It manages to communicate complex concepts in an appealing way
- Its appeal increases the chances for the readers to share the content
- It stimulates our minds, especially when it is linked with an emotion
So think ‘image’ as you write and prepare content. Especially if you’re writing a stuffy blog for fundraisers!
Tom
P.S. More practice. Priscilla the piggy bank watches over all my work, and is occasionally rewarded for her critiques …
Behavioral Science Q & A
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