It’s no secret that using a picture is a more effective social media strategy than not using a picture in the content you publish online. You can easily test this statement yourself. Scroll down your Facebook timeline. What stops you as you read down the page? It’s the pictures, right? (Especially those kittens! Too cute).
Your images don’t have to be just snaps you take. There are numerous stock photo sites (like http://fotolia.com and http://www.123rf.com) if you’re not a shutterbug yourself.
Stock image sources also often offer graphic images that aren’t photos. Some of these are great if you are handy with Photoshop, Illustrator, or Gimp and you want to customize them.
Another way of creating unique images is using AI image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion.
Need social media icons? These handy little graphics can be obtained for free. Just do a search for “free social media icons” and you can choose from thousands of free collections. One of my favourites shared a brief bit of description on the page that stated something like this, “I needed these for myself. I didn’t see any I liked, so I made my own. Thought I’d share.” Nice.
Often, the best pictures are the ones you take yourself. They can be just what you want, it doesn’t cost anything to buy them, and they’re more original content you can use on your site.
As if availability of all kinds of graphics isn’t convincing enough, let’s talk about using video.
Video offers an array of options for drawing people to you, and making sales…
- Embed a YouTube video on your page, and give the video thumbnail a caption. There! You’ve got a picture and a video (as well as content for your YouTube channel)!
- Best of all, video can help increase sales conversions on your pages by 80%, according to EyeViewDigital.com.
Speaking of increased video capability, you probably have all of the tools you need right now to create sharp images and fun graphics and videos for your own site. Pew Research Center published over a year ago that…
- 90% of American adults have a cell phone
- 58% of American adults have a smartphone
- 32% of American adults own an e-reader
- 42% of American adults own a tablet computer
And to give you even more recent numbers, eMarketer.com says that smart phone users will pass 2 billion by 2016.
Use that smart phone that you have with you all the time to create the image and video content you need for your site!
Your graphics aren’t just for your pages, either. Spin some traffic out of them and use your images and videos in your Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media campaigns you do.
To sum up about using images and video… With file sizes having come way down in all formats in the past few years, there’s no reason not to use graphics of all kinds on your site. Using images doesn’t have to drag your page load time when managed properly. You’ll warm up your message to your site visitors by setting a tone that only graphics can offer. And best of all, you are providing a multi-media experience to your site visitors that can help increase your conversion rate!
SBI! owners recently got a tutorial in their accounts on using Canva to create sharp, affordable, professional looking graphics. (Oops, did you miss yours?)
Get more tips and valuable how-to information. Start your online business with SBI! here.
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Try it. Simply follow the Video Action Guide. 
No strings. Better, actually...