Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Characteristics of high-quality image content
With imagery, it’s important to define a number of key characteristics of high quality image content:
- Make sure that photographs are shot at the highest possible resolution
- Make sure that you’re using a regular industry format, such as JPEGs, PNGs, or GIFs.
- Make sure that you have all the rights and permissions necessary to publish this particular piece of imagery
- Brand the individual piece of imagery, so that people can connect that piece of content to your brand if they see it out of context
- Make sure that your imagery complements the message that you’re pushing out
Benefits and challenges
Some of the benefits of image-based content are that images help bring slightly dull text-heavy content to life, they can make your content stand out in the newsfeed, and they can also add an element of personality or emotional connection to your brand or business.
Challenges with image-based content include the time and resources needed to invest in high quality image-based content. Also, remember that stock imagery can be used by your competitors too. So avoid embarrassing situations where you and a competitor are both caught using the same piece of stock imagery. And make sure that your image-based content is optimized to fit on the right social media platform at the right time.
Considerations for Facebook
Adding text to images on Facebook can be a very useful way of including further context for posts. However, there are a number of restrictions that apply to doing this.
Images with text content are eligible for pay promotion on Facebook. However, Facebook groups content into three main categories: content with low text, medium text, and high text. Reach is restricted based on how much text is included on an image post. There are exceptions to this: these would include any imagery that you have of products that happen to have text on them rather than images where text has been overlaid onto the picture in post-production. Examples might be album or book covers, movie posters, or infographics. Where possible, try and limit the amount of text that you include on images for your individual posts. These restrictions will affect any Facebook paid promotion of these individual posts.
Examples of branded image content
Here are some great examples of high quality images that have been branded by individual brands for their social media (see slide ‘Examples of branded image content’). Note the additional text layers that have been added in post-production, in addition to the branding. These text layers add an additional emotive cue for audiences and also link back to the brand benefits. If you saw these posts in isolation with no post copy whatsoever, the message would remain clear and the connection to the brand strong.
Evolution
To stand out in newsfeeds, social media content is evolving. More and more brands are starting to innovate their static imagery-based content into looping GIFs. Here’s a great example from L'Oréal (see slide ‘Evolution’), where they show a lady’s hair flowing in the wind, which generates a style of interaction that they wouldn’t necessarily get if it was a static image. Largely, these work better as pieces of content when there’s no long narrative and when the looping doesn’t become an irritation to users.
Back to TopSeán Earley
Creative Director at Teneo PSG Digital
- Creative Director at Teneo PSG Digital with five years’ experience in Digital Marketing, Social, and PR Agencies
- Founding member of Teneo PSG Digital
- Former Director on the Board of the Irish Internet Association
- Passionate about creating content that captures audience imaginations and delivers business objectives
