Over the years, images and videos have become increasingly important for communication purposes. A study shows thatmost Italian companies don’t focus too much on them, though there are some exceptions.
On the Internet, just like on printed material, what counts is content. Quality and substance of content is essential, and trying to sell an empty wrapper is absolutely useless.
However, nowadays users are increasingly submerged by the so-called “information overloading”, and the attraction they feel towards a story, a website or an ad is due to images or videos. This occurs for various reasons, like time shortage, the need for immediate and clear communication or the appeal and curiosity produced by images.
In Italy, most companies don’t use pictures, videos and infographics to communicate their corporate identity. However, companies that use these tools achieve far more positive results in terms of feedback and engagement from their audience. The latter was found by a study, Lundquist Social Media Awards 2012, which is part of a much larger research conducted by Lundquist, a consulting firm that specialises in online corporate communication. The study analysed how the 100 major Italian companies use filesharing services based on visual contents, like YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr and Slideshare to communicate their corporate identity and the values connected to it.
The research showed that YouTube is the most used social channel for content sharing, and 66 major Italian businesses use it. Of these, only 8 companies have totally personalised and advanced channels, one of them being Enel. According to Lundquist, it’s one of the only businesses that is capable of exploiting this channel as it should be done, providing a calendar with a considerable amount of videos. The video campaigns of these 8 Italian companies have achieved excellent results, and registrations to their channels have increased 85 percent more than those of the other surveyed businesses.
Second comes Pinterest, 18 firms use it, mainly posting commercial images. The third most used channel – 17 companies – is Slideshare, but only 5 businesses published contents in 2012. Finally, Flickr is used by 14 firms, mainly to communicate institutional contents.
