Introduction
Content, content, content. It’s all about creating content, which is why we’re all pretty much drowning in it right now. Over the last decade or so, we’ve experienced an explosion of online content unlike anything the world has ever seen. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that billions of pieces of content are published on a daily basis, with a large proportion coming from social media.
On the other hand, human attention spans have been decreasing—apparently to the point where we’re no better than goldfish.
That’s the real challenge for marketers and individual brands alike. The constant battle for user engagement has become more fierce than before, making content quality and relevance critical to the success of any online effort.
The end result is that most of the content online goes relatively unnoticed.
In a recent study by Moz and BuzzSumo, a randomly selected sample of 100,000 Facebook posts showed that over 50% received 2 or fewer interactions (likes, shares, and comments). Furthermore, over 75% of these posts had zero external linking domains.
One of the main reasons for this shocking lack of engagement is the proliferation of low-quality content, which is way too easy to create. But it’s not just the poor quality content producers that are suffering from content shock. Many of the more exemplary content producers of our time are also experiencing a reduction in average engagements per post.
So it all comes back to the fact that we are consuming more content than ever before, in more mediums on more devices and our attention spans are diminishing! The need for “scannable” content that’s easily consumable is more pressing than ever. We’re bombarded with words every single day and no longer have the time and/or patience to read all the content we want to consume.
The solution to the problem? More visuals, fewer words.
In this lesson we will cover the Following:
- Why Visual Content?
- Visual content type #1: Photos
- Visual content type #2: ‘Drawn’ Images (Graphics)
- Visual content type #3: Videos
- Visual content type #4: Memes
- Visual content type #5: Animated GIFs
- Visual content type #6: Infographics
- Visual content type #7: Calls-To-Action
- Visual content type #8: Screenshots
- Where to Distribute Your Visual Content