It has always been said that a good image “is worth more than a thousand words”. This is certainly true, in particular these days, in which we live in the civilization of images. What’s more, in social media, a good image, with its immediate effect, is also worth “more than a hundred videos”.
This is not a new concept, as marketers know. But the scenarios that are now starting to open, with their new forms of communication mainly based on images (photos), offer a number of new opportunities for social marketing. This trend is increasingly studied. Among others, recently David Edelman, a digital marketing specialist at the consulting firm McKinsey, highlighted some of the potentialities that are offered and gave some advice on how to manage them with the best results.
Naturally, at a first level photos and images are integrated in social media marketing strategies. This is what managers are already doing for the companies they work for, investing mostly on the integrating the “visual strategy” with apps and disseminating them more and more on mobile devices.
Nevertheless, the real quality shift consists in exploiting socials as much as possible by encouraging satisfied customers to publish pictures of the products they have purchased. For instance, a travel agency benefits from the photo albums of their trips that satisfied customers publish. But this trend can produce advantages even for technological communication.
This way, besides addressing a wider target audience, companies will be able to employ a powerful tool that will allow them to better understand the way in which their products are used: a first step to conceive ideas on how to improve or create new products. Once more, “an image is worth more than a thousand words”.
