The Role of Images in Your Social Media Marketing 

It is easy to forget, when you are cutting down a tweet to make it fit 140 characters, that Twitter actually lets you communicate with a thousand words. You will not be able to fit all of those words into the timeline, of course, but that is the value of a picture — and Twitter does allow pictures.

It is a relatively new thing. Twitter launched without any imaging ability at all. Like hash tags, pictures attached to tweets were an innovation that came from the community, in this case from TwitPic. Now images are built-in and every profile comes with a camera roll that contains the user’s images, and which anyone can browse.

And it is likely that people do. 

Check out the profile of someone interesting on Twitter or a business you are considering following on the site and it is almost inevitable that you will find yourself looking through their images. It is a much faster way than reading their tweets to discover who they are. 

For individuals, that picture roll is likely to contain shots of themselves and their family — and, too often, of their lunch and their desserts. Businesses should be focused on offering behind-the-scenes shots, images from sales events and any appearances of their product in the media. 

And Here is the President with Our Product

One company that does this very well is tablet case-maker Dodocase. The company’s image stream on Twitter contains more than 40 photographs. Some of the images show the cases in production. Others depict the company’s stall and the product at craft fairs. A few show the case when it pops up on television shows. 

The effect is to pull the reader in, to give them bonus glimpses of a product they admire and a company they love. The pictures help to deepen the relationship with the customer.

On Facebook, the images do even more; the company has 99 photos on its Wall alone, including a shot of a Dodocase sitting on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. Other images though have been tagged. This shot, for example, shows a couple of people wearing the company logo during a bike race. By tagging those people, though, the picture does not just become available for them to see; it is also pushed onto their profiles where their contacts see them. 

That is a strategy that is been used to great effect by wedding photographers in particular. After the shoot, photographers have been known to upload a selection of images then tag the people in those images. The photographer will not know the names of everyone in the photo but he can invite others to add their own tags. The tagging pushes the image onto a guest’s page and puts a sample of his product in front of more people who match his market demographic.

So a business using social media can post product photos and behind-the-scene photos. It can upload images of their product being used in all sorts of interesting ways (although few can manage to land a shot of their item on the President’s desk). And it can post images of customers — and expect those customers to bring in more customers.

Did somebody say a picture is worth a thousand words?