The recent publication of Buddy Media’s Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review highlighted the importance of using imagery when engaging through Twitter. They found that:

“Tweets with image links (such as pic.twitter.com, yfrog.com, instagr.am and twitpic.com) have engagement rates two times higher than Tweets without image links.”

This insight reinforces the value of creating image based content to support your social network participation and marketing activity.

In addition to Twitter consider the success of Pinterest, officially the fastest growing social network of all time, which is based on the concept of ‘pinning’ and sharing visual content (see Sarah’s great post on Pinterest from earlier this year for more information). Then there’s Facebook which, with the introduction of Timelines, is actively encouraging more image based engagement. As this blog from Social Media Today explains, posts which feature photos drive the highest level of engagement on Facebook.  And of course there’s Instagram, an exclusively photo and mobile based network, which has over 30 million members and was recently bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

The lesson is to consider how you can bring your brand to life using imagery; this could be through featuring your products, posting behind the scenes photos so customers can get to know your staff and your company philosophy or simply sharing images of things you like. Increasingly it seems that when it comes to social, it pays to think visual.

Some examples to get you thinking:

Pinterest: Lamborghini, Whole Foods, McDonalds and this striking effort from Uniqlo.

Facebook: Manchester United and Innocent.