tech talk
What is
Visual Social Marketing?
By Kapil Bh ati a
First we had the weblogs or blogs, and then came the updates on Facebook, Orkut, My Space followed by Tumblr posts. This was followed by mobile blogging on sites like Posterous which shrunk to Tweets and finally to Instagram and Pinterest. The medium through which we express our thoughts and emotions online have changed drastically over a decade. We now express more with fewer words. In many cases words are replaced by a photograph or a video.
internet users have shifted their mode of communication and so have many online businesses and brands. Here’s how smart brands are navigating the new visual social-media era. A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it’s the pictures they put that are enjoyed the most. Forty four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media. Pictures have become one of our default modes of sorting and understanding the vast amounts of information we’re exposed to every day. The study concluded that women are more likely to respond to pictures and men are more likely to
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MARCH 2013
respond to videos. The trend towards the visual media is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they’re discovering that taking a picture “on the go” using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard. In addition, the quickest growing social networks and applications are visual. Flipboard, a visual news app, was the number one application when the iPad was launched. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. We can communicate more infor-