Whether you’re looking to brighten up your social content strategy, or you want to make your social media more colorful, adding some fun visuals to your updates can work wonders.

Posts that include images receive (on average) 650 % more engagement than their text-only peers, so it’s worth taking the time to experiment with your visuals.

From infographics to high-quality product shots, there are plenty of different ways you can add images to your social strategy, regardless of your budget, time, and internal resources.

Read on to find out how you can go visual with your social marketing today…

Create infographics

With their ability to increase web traffic by up to 12 percent, infographics are a popular choice for brands and marketers to inject their social marketing with a little color.

Infographics make it easy to present usually uninspiring facts and figures to audiences in an engaging way. Plus. a colorful, eye-catching design combined with bitesize statistics also makes infographics super shareable as well.

It’s important to get two things right: use valid, interesting statistics and ensure the design is brilliant. The information you include should be taken from respected sources and relevant to your topic, and of course, referenced properly at the bottom.

Your design should tell the story of your data – it’s important to link the visuals to your narrative. If you aren’t a designer and you don’t have the resource to take on a freelancer, use tools like Piktochart or Canva to create attractive infographics yourself.

Learn to take photographs

Whether you want to document life behind the scenes at your company or start sharing inventive, candid shots of your products, learning to take a good photograph is vital.

With the technology and software used on smartphones, you don’t need to splash out on an expensive professional camera. There’s an art to taking photos on your phone, but you can pick it up with a bit of practice.

Experiment with editing and filters too. You don’t want to go overboard and post synthetic, unrealistic shots, but a careful tweak can make your photos really pop out in people’s timelines.

Using great photos is sure to pay off. Tweets with images get 150% more retweets than those without, and Facebook posts with images get 2.3X more engagement than picture-free ones.

Use video

Incorporating video into your social marketing is getting more and more important. Over 500 million Facebook users watch video every single day, and 43 percent of B2C marketers say video is their most successful type of marketing content. By 2021, it’s predicted that video will make up 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic.

You can create all kinds of videos: from tours of your facility to quick interviews with employees. You can give customers a better look at your products, or provide live video of any events or days out. Live video is becoming increasingly popular with audiences, and it’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing down in 2019.

And it’s easy to do on your phone too – you don’t need any expensive kit. There are plenty of free video editing apps around, in addition to the built-in software that comes on most smartphones.

Go behind the scenes

Customers love getting to know the people behind their favorite brands. Small things like a candid shot of where you work, a photo from a company day out or an image of your team hard at work can go a long way in engaging your audience and giving them an insight into who your brand is.

It’s also a great way to show off the workplace culture and how your teams work together. This is valuable for your recruitment and hiring process: prospective employees are highly likely to browse your social accounts before coming in for an interview, and it gives them a quick snapshot at what life could be like.

TOMs is a great example of how you can portray your company culture and ethos visually. On Instagram, the brand posts pictures of the local children who receive donated shoes as part of TOMs’ one-for-one charity initiative.

Collect user-generated content

User-generated content helps you build a loyal customer base by engaging with individuals who love your products. It also serves as testimonials for potential customers who are just dipping their toe into your brand.

In fact, 85 percent of users find user-generated content more persuasive than content created by a brand. And as an added bonus, it also provides you with some extra visual content to cascade across your other marketing channels.

People love being featured by the brands they shop with, so reposting an image taken by a customer – and tagging them in it – will always go down well.

And user-generated content doesn’t just work for the big brands either. Even small businesses can use UGC to grow a strong, closely-knit consumer base. Look at any of the established businesses for sale on Exchange and you’ll find stores that got to where they are now by building a close, loyal community. They achieved this by engaging their customers directly with user-generated content that makes them feel like they are part of something bigger.

If your customers know that you’re posting and sharing their content, they’ll make the effort to join in. Make it easy to collect user-generated content by creating a branded hashtag for your customers to use.

Share advice

If you’re short on time but want to share something poignant and resonant, think about posting visual quotes. Use a relevant image as the background – or low, muted colors – and put either a great tip or an inspiring quote on top.

These are easy to produce and often go down well on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Sharing your knowledge is easy but can go a long way in improving your community engagement.

Not only does visual content help brighten up your social feeds and improve your engagement, but it strikes an emotional chord with your audience. Customers can discover more about the people behind the brand, as well as the products or services you supply.

Visual content is more likely to be read and shared too, helping to grow your audience and spread awareness of your business.

Ensure that what you post is always high quality and is suitable for your audience. Test what works and what doesn’t, and start to build successful visual assets into your social strategy.

Kayleigh Alexandra writes all about startups and small businesses for Micro Startups, a site committed to supporting great charities and helping them grow. Check out the website for some informative articles, and head to our Twitter account @getmicrostarted to follow our updates.