In the past, I theorized that we were moving closer to visual marketing.
Guess what? We’re there. We’ve arrived.
According to this awesome blog post by Hubspot, there are many reasons why you should be focused on visual marketing on your blog and in your social media posts.
Let’s review a few of them.
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. Okay, the source for this statistic is Buffer, usually rated among the top three blogs in social media so I believe them and so should you.
- In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images. So, if you want more people to read your entire blog post, include multiple, color images.
- Users view 85% of videos on Facebook without sound. What this tells me is that it’s the images that mesmerize people.
- Cisco projects that global internet traffic from videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021. You can replace the word images with the word video. Whether you post images or video, you need to do one or the other.
- 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. Convinced yet?
- Video (63%), alone, has also surpassed blogging (60%) in usage as a social media marketing asset. Yeah, video is huge. Just look at how popular Facebook Live is.
Also, several sources indicate that including images with your tweets double the chance of a retweet. So don’t tweet anything without including an image.
Finally, I find it interesting that 65% of the population are visual learners. Therefore, it makes sense that we ended up here, in the midst of visual marketing.
Finally, look at the rapid growth of Instagram. The user base soared from 90 million in January 2013 to 300 million in December 2014. Guess where we’re at now?
Instagram has 1 billion monthly users. Incredible, eh?
Free Image Sources for Your Visual Marketing
I’ve written about free image sources in the past but that listed needed to be updated. So here’s an up-to-the-minute list of free image sources that are available today.
When you navigate to this website, the following words greets you:“Beautiful, free photos. Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.”
All images on this website are free to use, which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for commercial purposes, without any attribution to the photographer.
Crediting photographers here isn’t required, but that would be excellent. It’s your choice.
By the way, you’re going to love these photographs.
Another one of my favorite free image sites is Pixabay.
I’ve been using this site for years, and sometimes I’m amazed at the free images I find.
Pixabay greets you with this message: “Over 1.5 million royalty free stock photos and videos shared by our generous community.”
Once in a while, the folks behind this website ask you to buy them a cup of Java. Otherwise, you can avoid the cost by uploading images of your own for Pixabay to make available for its users.
This website provides vintage imagesfrom public archives that are free of copyright restrictions. Most are black and while a few are in color.
This website provides stock images for free. If you’d like, you can donate to this website.
This website has some fun and unusual images. They are all high resolution pictures that you can use for free both personally and for commercial projects, such as your blog or website. The photographer for all of these images is Ryan McGuire.
Morguefile has come a long way. When researching it in the past, it seemed as though I could only find stodgy looking images. Its website has had a facelift, too. Visit Morguefile today. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Oh yeah, their photos are free.
You can search by any category including popular images, recently added images, the most downloaded images, and recently downloaded images. And, of course, these images are free.
This website has a beautiful collection of images that are copyright free that you can use for both commercial and personal use.
Good Free Photos has an extensive public domain stockpile of free and high-resolution pictures. It also has vectors and clip art.
If you’re willing to pay a nominal fee, Freepik is worth the price. A premium account costs $89.99 a year. Alternatively, you can pay a monthly fee of $9.99.
With that fee, you’ll have access to more than 2,322,700 images. Check it out.
Before putting any image on your website or blog, you need to compress the image so that it doesn’t slow the loading time of your website.
Everyone hates web pages that take forever to load, right? Well, that is what happens when you don’t compress pictures.
TinyPng is also free so use it.
Frances Caballo is an online marketing consultant and the author of six books on social media. Click here to schedule an appointment with her. Writing a book can serve as the best possible business card you can possibly have and establish your authority in your field. Once you publish your book, learn to market it by visiting my other website, SocialMediaJustforWriters.com.