Quick Social Media Tip: A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words

The power of visuals is apparent in print media, and this power translates to social media, too. Facebook posts that include pictures have more than twice the impressions than posts without them. This may be particularly true with Facebook’s new Timeline functionality for brand pages, which allows you to “highlight” posts expanding them from a small box on the page to a post that takes the full width of the screen. Twitter posts with multimedia content-photos or videos-yield twice the results via retweets.

One way to maximize your use of images is through yet another social medium: Instagram. If you aren’t already familiar with it, Instagram can be installed as an app on your smart phone. As of March 2012, there were more than 27 million Instagram accounts and more than 60 images were being uploaded per second (outpacing Flickr). Instagram gained popularity thanks to its photo filters that give images a retro vibe. Because it integrates with Facebook and Twitter, when you take a photo you can share with Instagram users as well as with external sites. This will likely expand now that Facebook has purchased Instagram.