Are You A Swipe Stopper?

They say a picture tells a thousand words. I say, we need to be using more pictures that tell our own story.

Traditionally, in PR, advertising, direct mail… pictures have been used to illustrate the words, and that was fine. But we’ve moved on since then. There is still a role for pictures in that context but images can do so much more. With the advent of social media, the way that we can use pictures as a standalone mechanic to tell their own story and extend the brand has increased exponentially.

The most obvious use of images on social media is on image-led platforms and the likes of Instagram and Pinterest have been used successfully by many brands to great effect.

Instagram can be an ideal tool for helping you to demonstrate the personality behind the brand with ‘fly on the wall’ shots of the working day. For contractors it can even provide a tool for documenting the project’s journey to delivery with shots of key milestones along the way.

Pinterest, meanwhile, has been used successfully by many businesses to demonstrate their knowledge and align their brand with others. This platform has been used particularly successfully by architects by leveraging creative images that they have found and ‘pinned’ to reflect the culture and creativity of their practice. It’s a great way of using content that already exists online and gaining additional value from the time you’re already spending browsing as research. What’s more, it enables you to ‘borrow’ content that benefits your brand without having to spend valuable marketing budget on commissioning your own images.

We’re not just talking about image-led social media here, however. Text-led platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can also be vehicles for sharing image-led content that supports or extends you brand. And it offers you the opportunity to engage in a fun and entertaining way that can be used to give your brand personality and engage more effectively with audiences.

The point here is that the internet and social media platforms are jam packed full of content, so you not only need to think about what messages you are putting up there and how you increase your audience on line, you also need to be creative enough to capture your audience’s attention. Just because you have three thousand followers on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that three thousand people are viewing every piece of content you put up there.

What you need is content that will prevent your audience from swiping past your post until they see something that catches their eye. You need to post that swipe-stopping content and the more you do the more your audience will start actively looking for what you have to show them.