Did the photo catch your attention?
Cute kittens or animals dressed as other animals (points here for hitting both categories) can rake in major views on Buzzfeed, Pinterest, Reddit, and Instagram and they take only a few seconds to enjoy. Whether you choose to scroll, hover, or click, visual social media sites are cultivating an audience with short attention spans, quick fingers, and a “must-see-it-all” attitude that turns a 5-minute pre-sleep Internet jaunt into hitting the pillow at 4:00am.
In Ekatrina Walter’s Fast Company article, The Rise Of Visual Social Media, she points to these websites as establishing a new set of habits for consumers that few brands have yet to fully embrace. Photographs own the ability to spread the word within seconds and avoid language-barriers, while the ease of upload allows for an increased interactive relationship between viewer and brand. Twitter took the paragraph down to 140 characters, but any Facebook users out there know that a status update isn’t nearly as thrilling (or clickable) as a mobile upload.
Creating visual content is a great way to reach the modern consumer while hitting the ultimate creator’s trifecta; this medium is quick, cheap, and easy. That said, it is a platform that favors “going viral” so a successful campaign must stem from an infallible branding concept that can hold its own no matter where it ends up in the WWW.
Check out how these brands are using visual social media to personalize their images:
Photo credit: http://www.zimbio.com/Cute+Animal+Pictures/notes/2/Tiny+Cat
