5 Ways to Use Pictures to Tell Visual Stories With Social Media

Are you sharing your stories with your fans?

Do you use pictures in your social marketing?

People want pictures in their social channels.

When done right, these pictures become visual stories.

In this article, I’ll show you how five brands are using pictures to share their stories and why that’s important.

Great Marketers Are Great Storytellers

 

As a marketer, you know the importance of stories, but do you know how to tell a story with few or no words at all?

“We’ve now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word,” says Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate and former SVP of Netscape.” Some are now calling it the dawn of the Imagesphere.”

Our brains process pictures 60,000 times faster than text. When your brand shares a picture, your fans decide in a split second whether they want to see more.

People upload about 250 million photographs to Facebook every day, and Twitter has become more visual, showing photos and videos right in your feed.

The growth of other image-rich sites like Pinterest has been stratospheric, and apps such as Instagram, Vine and even Snapchat aren’t just for teenagers–savvy marketers are using them too.
These channels help you tell stories that create engagement, build communities and ultimately help nurture brand loyalty and long-term relationships with customers.

Below I’ll show you how five brands are using visual stories to engage their audiences.

#1: Give Life to Your Products

 

Stories don’t have to be history and they don’t have to be long. In fact, quick-moving social platforms encourage using fewer words. Twitter has always limited you to 140 characters, but now you can add a picture or video to your update to reinforce your message.

Whole Foods Market used this picture on Twitter to emphasize how their products fit into customers’ lifestyles:

Whole Foods Market connects with followers by sharing pictures of their products.

Over 3.5 million fans follow @WholeFoods, in part because the brand shares great ideas on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Whole Foods’ tastebud-worthy pictures aren’t just for show; they subtly reinforce that all of the ingredients to make a delicious meal are available at their stores.

Tip: Use high-quality images or videos to give a “lifestyle” angle to your marketing. Show your customers how they can use your product in their everyday lives.

#2: Tell Your Other Story

 

Whether you want to share your culture, show how you design a product or celebrate some of the unsung heroes of your business, photos tell a more eloquent story than any copy ever could.
Your fans know what you look like on the outside. If you want to make a deeper connection with them, show your brand’s human side with a peek into your everyday humdrum.

Letting your fans see an alternate perspective gives them a new, more personal way to connect with your brand.

ABC World News uses Instagram to show a lighter side of the network that truly connects with its audience. Sharing informal moments makes anchors, reporters and their teams appear more relatable.

A look behind the scenes helps your brand connect on a personal level.

ABC World News shares these personal glimpses across all of their social networks, but Instagram lends itself especially well to the in-the-moment, spontaneous fun.

Tip: Don’t just take photos of perfect “on-air” moments. Give depth to your brand by showing the real work that goes into researching, designing and marketing your products. Those pictures convey your passion far better than an oh-so-perfect photo shoot.

#3: Celebrate Your Community’s Passion

 

Why do your customers buy your products instead of your competitors’? What is the lifestyle that goes hand-in-hand with your brand? As a marketer, you know the answers to those questions and how they define your audience.

Too many brands only use Pinterest as a way to show off their products and services. But the most successful companies on Pinterest tell the story their customers want to hear.

For example, at Random House, Inc., they know that books aren’t a product, they are a way of life for their customers. They use images to capture the entire philosophy of books, reading and literary interests.

Random House, Inc.’s 1.5 million Pinterest followers appreciate that and are eager to follow boards like What Would Jane Austen Do?, Bookish Nooks and Literary Weddings.

Know your audience’s passions and give them the story they want.

Tip: Highlight the things your customers love, celebrate the communities where you live, share what causes are close to your heart and show what inspires you.

#4: Bring Your Brand to Life With Video

 

If you’re only using YouTube as a repository for your ‘official’ advertising, you’re missing the boat. You can do so much more with video—and give people a reason to subscribe to your channel.
Beloved tech brand Apple is a master at creating videos their fans want to watch, share and comment on.

For example, this video, which has over 3 million views, gives a tour of Apple’s new Touch ID fingerprint identity sensor—a tech development they know their fans are interested in.

Show off exclusive product features (and their stories) to wow your audience.

What sets Apple apart is that they don’t just show you the new feature, they show you the stories behind innovations; why they were necessary and how they make lives better. Fans identify with those stories because it’s their problems being solved.

Tip: Use videos to create a story around your product features. Share employee and customer passion to relate with your audience and let them know their interests are your driving force.

#5: Cater to an Individual Audience

 

Sometimes, when you try to reach everyone, you end up reaching no one. In those cases, it helps to set up channels for specific niche audiences and just tell the story that’s relevant to them.

If you’re trying to reach the elusive age 16-24 demographic, Tumblr is a perfect choice to show your visual journey, one photo at a time.

Target’s style blog on Tumblr is successful because it shares only the images that their younger, female, more fashion-conscious followers are interested in.

Under each image or set there’s a link back to the product page, which is a very clever way of selling without the hard sell.

Use social platforms geared toward the community you want to reach.

Tip: Don’t use a one-size-fits-all story. Focus on a specific niche by telling a story relevant to them. If you’re having fun with it, they will too, and they may be more likely to buy. Don’t forget to drive traffic back to particular sections of your website.

Over to You

Social media is a gift to storytellers: You can tell a story in more interesting ways than ever before and reach a much larger audience.

Using images and video to tell your story gives a new dimension to your brand and builds closer relationships with your fans, followers and subscribers.

What do you think? How have you used pictures to tell a bigger story? How has your community responded to your visual content? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.

How To Use Social Media For Viral Marketing

Viral marketing depends on word-of-mouth: the willingness people have to share the things they see and enjoy with their friends. Thanks to social media, sharing content has never been easier. Popular posts and pictures can spread around the internet like wildfire, gaining the person or company that posted it a lot of great publicity.

Frustratingly, however, viral marketing is very difficult: as much as you prepare your content and share it online, there’s no way to predict how well your posts will do. In order to be with any chance of your content going viral, preparation is key. Here are a few tips and hints on how to successfully implement social media in your viral marketing strategies.

Prepare

If you’re creating content that you want to go viral, then you need to know your audience. There’s no point in creating content that will attract 18-25 year old, single men if you’re trying to promote a family car. You also need to work out what sort of content you want to use. Any type of content can go viral – tweets, images, infographics, articles – but videos go viral more frequently and in a bigger way than any other type of content. Choose a type of content that will work for what you’re trying to promote, will appeal to your audience and can be shared across numerous social media networks.

As I said earlier, preparation is key to viral marketing. You need to be prepared if your social content does go viral on social media. Even if you’re content goes viral, you might lose out if you can’t follow up on it. You need to make sure that you can engage with people who enjoy your content, and then follow it up with a campaign. Viral content rarely lasts very long, it’s more of a flash in the pan, but if you follow up successful viral content with a campaign you can keep it in the public eye for longer.

You also need to make sure that you maintain active social media accounts before you attempt viral marketing. If you just post something cold, it’s unlikely to do very well. Instead engage and interact online: share and comment on other people’s content and maybe they’ll share your content. Whatever content you post you also need to make sure that it’s mobile compatible – almost 30% of social media users access sites on their mobiles.

2. Make it Sharable

Content can only go viral if it’s easy to share and people will only share content that they find interesting. Make sure that your content is compelling and appealing and, very importantly, that it isn’t too long: people want content that gives them instant gratification. Also, the faster content can be enjoyed, the quicker it will get shared. Last month, Unruly released a white paper detailing how to make content sharable. They concluded that content has to elicit a strong emotional reaction in order to get shared. Create content that is funny or exciting: the more funny and exciting, the more likely it will be shared.

You also need to make sure that, if your content is posted on sites other then social media platforms, the share buttons are very obvious and easy to use. Put on a tally so that people can see how often your content gets shared on social media as an added incentive. Content with high share tallies persuade people that they are popular, and that sharing them is the usual thing to do.

You could even offer a reward to people who share your content: make a competition where the entry is dependent on sharing a photo or video, and then reward the winner with a prize. You also want to get the right people sharing your content. Try to publicise your content to people with large followings on social media. A celebrity endorsement can boost sharing and engagement massively.

3. Start a Conversation

When it comes to viral marketing, being controversial can be one of the best strategies to ensure success. It your content touches on a controversial subject, dividing opinion, you can start debates in the comments sections of social media sites. This will, in turn, draw more attention to your content as people will see their friends commenting on your content in their news feed on Facebook, or theirTwitter/Google+ stream.

Often, topical content sparks the best conversations. Stay abreast of what’s happening in the world: a story or item of news that might be relevant to your industry can be leveraged to promote your business. Content centred on a popular news article can draw the attention of people checking it out.

Going viral is never assured, however much you prepare, and there really isn’t a sure fire way that you can make your content viral. However, by following these steps (and with a lot of luck), your content might well go viral on social media sites.

Has any of your content gone viral?

YouTube Adds Embeddable Subscribe Buttons

YouTube is finally adding one-click embeddable Subscribe buttons to offsite pages, allowing users to subscribe to a company or individual's channel without visiting its YouTube page.

For paid channels, the Subscribe button links to the channel pages rather than automatically subscribing users, YouTube noted in a blog entry.

The move is a part of an effort to encourage users to subscribe to more channels.

"We want to help you build your channel's audience where ever your fans are," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable. "Just like you've been able to embed your videos, now you can embed a one-click subscribe button on your site to make it easy for fans to follow you on YouTube."

The steps to add the new feature are relatively simple. Just enter the name of the channel by clicking here. YouTube then configures a personalized code, which you can copy and paste into any content management system running a website.

Image: AFP/Getty Images

5 Tips to Design the Best YouTube Channel Page

If you create and share your own videos on YouTube, then you've already taken the first step in putting your face out there. But there's another way to put your best face forward: Craft your channel page. Though your channel's landing page might appear simple (and it's grown simpler over the years), there are a number of features you can fine-tune to optimize a viewer's experience. You can't customize like you used to, and there's a lot of white space, but there are very specific ways to make your page stand out. Read on to find out how you can turn curious viewers into devoted subscribers.

Do you have any tips for boosting your YouTube profile? Let us know in the comments.

1. Post a great channel trailer.

 As soon as visitors land on your page, you want to hook them. A channel trailer is a great way to do it. You'll want something brief, attention-grabbing and representative of the kind of content you post. Don't tell people what you do — show them.

As the first piece of content some will see, the trailer is also a good place to plant the seed for subscribing. Get a quick line in there asking viewers to hit "subscribe." But do it subtly.

2. Optimize your channel name and description. 

Remember that your channel name and description won't just appear on your homepage. Your channel will appear in searches and suggested channel categories across YouTube, so make sure it's appealing. Note that your channel name isn't the same as your URL; you can change the former without affecting the latter.

As you write your channel description, it's good to think about how it will appear across the site and around the web. You'll need a description that highlights your most important content right up front.

3. Pick the right icon. 

The key here is to select something that will look good at very small resolutions. It's not like choosing your Facebook or Twitter profile photo; first of all, this is about branding. Your friends don't care that much if your photo is recognizable, or if it's even of you. But in the age of short attention spans, this tiny piece of real estate is your best bet for pulling viewers to your channel page.

4. Make beautiful channel art. 

Again, it's important to consider where your content will be seen other than your channel page. Or in this case, how it will be seen. You'll have viewers on desktops, tablets, laptops, phones, televisions and whatever new format comes out next week. That means you need to optimize your image to look great on every platform.

YouTube recommends the dimensions 2560x1440 px. Check out its image guidelines to see how your art will be cropped across different platforms (who will be seeing what). Here's the full art for Mashable's YouTube channel page. Note that only the illustrated band in the center of the image is visible on desktop.

When you're drafting the art, try to give the viewer something to connect to beyond a brand or a logo. If you want to throw your pretty face in there, do so. YouTube lists GoPro and Epic Meal Time as well-designed channel pages.

5. Maintain your feed. 

As a content creator, you'll want to keep your loyal subscribers entertained. If you don't upload on a weekly schedule, the feed can give you the appearance of being active. A default feed will include your uploads, videos you have liked, videos you added to playlists and channels to which you subscribe. 

You can adjust your sharing settings if you don't want to flood your subscribers with updates. But you can also approach it strategically: You might only want to like certain videos or comment on content on certain days of the week, for instance.

Homepage image courtesy of Flickr, Jo Nakashima

Google Hangouts App: One Giant Leap for Chat Kind

Hands up if you've ever been in this situation: You start a conversation with a friend or family member at your desk on Instant Messenger. Away from your desk, you send them a text. Later on, you decide it makes more sense to speak face-to-face on Skype.

All of a sudden, you've got a balkanized conversation. And it's far, far worse if you're trying to involve multiple people. You quickly get to the point where you can't remember who said what to whom on what service on what device.

Wouldn't it be easier if it was all unified — if there was one conversation app to rule them all, on PC, tablet and mobile? Where you could pick up the conversation whenever, no matter what the platform, no matter what the year?

Guess Who?

Google has long been in a perfect position to dominate the realm of chat. The Hangouts service is the gold standard of video messaging. It's incredibly easy to add up to 10 people to a chat, and more importantly, to do fun stuff with them — share your screen, watch a video together, even wear silly hats and disguises.

Never has a more powerful piece of face-recognition tech been used for a more whimsical purpose. Google understands that wherever groups gather for social reasons, they need something to do. You need conversation pieces. You need the fun stuff. (In that vein, the company has created 850 new hand-drawn emoji for Hangouts' text chat feature.)

I've tried chatting with my family on Skype and iChat; both tend to slow down or break down, and a pleasant conversation devolves into a tech-support session. Google Hangouts just work. (Well, nine times out of 10 ain't bad.)

Until the company launched a standalone Google Hangouts app Wednesday, it was easy to be unaware of your option to Hangout on mobile. This was because you had to do it via the Google+ app. Mountain View doesn't miss an opportunity to push its social network on you. And that kept a whole load of less tech-savvy users — read, parents — at bay.

But to Google's credit: Now that it has decided to push Hangouts as a standalone service, it's pushing its capabilities to the limit. Facebook has chat heads; Google just vaulted to the head of the chat world. All that's missing is SMS and iMessage integration. But it's already starting to look like those services, at least.

Paradigm Shifts

Take a look at any SMS conversation. Your stream of texts with a given person never stops. The conversation may be infrequent, but it can go on forever. It thinks of chat as an infinite scroll.
It's odd that one of the creakiest chatting technologies in the world — plain old SMS, invented in 1992 — showed the way to the future of chat, but this is what seems to have happened. Facebook Messages picked up on the text-stream idea a while back. By adding video and photos, Google just leap-frogged them.
Now Hangouts never end; they just pause. The video chats live on, their times recorded, in a stream of communication. In this stream, you'll find seamless integration of Gchat messages. You can be chatting via Hangout on your iPhone, and what you just said will instantly pop up in your Gmail window.

You can share photos, and know they'll always be there in the social stream of your Hangout with a particular person at a particular time. This means the Hangouts app constitutes a credible alternative to Flickr, Instagram or Path; it's easier to find your photos if you remember who you sent them to.
(Sure, the photos technically live on Google+, but you can safely ignore that fact.)

On Hangouts for the iPhone, you can switch back and forth between video and Gchatting (or Google Talking, or whatever you want to call it). Which means Google just did an end-run around one Apple product — FaceTime — while also making irrelevant many IM apps in the Apple ecosystem. My favorite was IMO; now I have to consider whether I'll ever be using that app again.

Of course, you can probably guess the downside to all this. Say it with me now:

Privacy Problem

Remember how you could go off the record in Gchat? Well, you can still do that, but you can no longer make it the default for every chat. A tiny note on a support page was added Wednesday, and it said this:

We've made a change to the Google Chat and Google Talk chat history settings. You can turn individual chats off the record, but you'll no longer have the option to make chatting off the record the default setting for all of your chats.

Google, it seems from this typically roundabout way of delivering controversial feature changes, wants to nudge you into having a recorded history. It encourages you to see the Hangout as a softer, more social kind of stream — almost like Facebook Timeline.

What do you think? Will you download the app? How will you use it? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

YouTube Now Has One Billion Monthly Users

We all know YouTube is the biggest video sharing site around, but how big is it, exactly, when compared to sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Here's a hint: YouTube has just hit one billion monthly unique users.
For comparison, Facebook hit that milestone in October 2012. It took the social network eight years to reach one billion active users — almost the exact amount of time as YouTube, which was founded in February 2005. Twitter, which has been around since March 2006, has more than 200 million monthly active users.

The YouTube team gives us a few more comparisons for good measure: "Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube. Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences. If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India," says YouTube on its official blog.

YouTube also gives a more detailed insight on what's powering this growth in another blog post about Generation C and mobile devices. According to YouTube, Generation C (or Gen C) is a generation that has grown up consuming content "where and when they want". They watch YouTube on all screens; they constantly switch between devices, they're deeply engaged with online video and they thrive on community. Finally, they're curators — they care about finding content that's important to them.

Gen C, which YouTube considers to be its core audience, now watch just as much YouTube content on smartphones as they do on PCs, and 67% of Gen C watch YouTube on two devices or more, compared to 53% of the general population.

With the rise of smartphones, which have become the dominant force in the mobile phone industry in the last couple of years and show no signs of slowing down, YouTube needn't worry about maintaining this growth for at least another couple of years.

Image credit: YouTube

Vine Update Has Age Restrictions And Allows Video Sharing At Any Time

After last week’s controversy, Twitter affiliate Vine, the six second video sharing service, has released an update to restrict some content to users under seventeen.

Only a few days after Vine was announced as Twitter’s new affiliate video sharing service, it was making the headlines for polar opposing reasons.

The service was an instant hit, adopted by both brands – such as Gap and Red Vine – and the general public. Its popularity, however, was marred by the fact that adult content was readily available to all users, regardless of age, some of which was accidentally posted on one of Vine’s “editor’s feeds”.

There were also some significant drawbacks in the service, the most troublesome being the inability to share videos to other sites after they had been posted.

Today, Version 1.0.5 of the Vine app was released, introducing a 17+ age rating to feeds with adult content and allowing users to share their own posted videos at any point.

The update, which was first noticed by The Verge, also provides users with a block function, very similar to that seen on Twitter – before, users could only report content that they thought was inappropriate.

Vine does not currently allow users to post other people’s videos on external sites, but there are third parties that provide this service.

What do you think of the Vine update?