Chapter 8
Visual Content
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Seconds
For the past few years, prominent speakers, bloggers, and authors have predicted a rise in “brand journalism.” In other words, companies will increasingly employ professional journalists to report on both the organization's industry as well as broader topics that are likely to interest their buyers. And it turns out, they were right. From Forbes business reporter Tomas Kellner joining GE as a managing editor to the former editorial director of Road Magazine being named “brand journalist” at performance bicycle manufacturer Felt Bicycles, the trend is happening across companies of all sizes and in all industries.
Yet with each piece of marketing-produced content, the Internet becomes proportionally “noisier,” and your buyer has incrementally less time to find your signal within all of the web's noise. This phenomenon has led to a rise in “visual communications,” or design-heavy content that provides a degree of information disproportionate to the amount of time required to consume it. Infographics, animated “explainer” videos, interactive visualizations, and slide presentations that don't contain a single bullet have emerged to release some of the pressure on the customer's time. In response, we've seen a rise in specialty social networks that help people discover and share this visual content. Let's take a look at some of the most popular visual content communities.
SlideShare
SlideShare is a community built around the discovery and celebration of beautiful presentations. Initially dubbed “YouTube for PowerPoint,” the company has since experimented with various forms of visual content, from videos to webinars to infographics—some more successfully than others. In 2012, LinkedIn acquired SlideShare to help increase content sharing on the professional social network. Today, SlideShare enjoys 215 million monthly page views.
Despite the diverse formats accepted by SlideShare, the community still tends to coalesce most around presentations. The company name itself has become an eponym, with marketers referring to creative presentations simply as “SlideShares.”
It's not uncommon for a popular SlideShare to receive tens of thousands of views, particularly if the site features the presentation on its home page. Viral SlideShares can tally in the hundreds of thousands. We're proud of the fact that we produced the most popular business SlideShare of 2013 with over 1.2 million views. (You can see this deck at http://CultureCode.com.)
Because SlideShare's audience skews professional, the network also integrates with many marketing automation systems. If a marketer inserts a lead capture form into a presentation, SlideShare can import those leads into the organization's marketing database. This feature is particularly relevant for B2B marketers.
Visual.ly
Infographic design, a subset of the larger “data visualization” category, is a specialty within a specialty. Many connoisseurs of this content type frequent Visual.ly to procure, discover, or publish visual content, infographics in particular.
Visual.ly is both a marketplace that matches companies with data visualization professionals (to produce infographics, videos, interactive content, and presentations) as well as a “visual storytelling” community, where this type of content can be published, discovered, discussed, and shared. Content does not need to be produced by Visual.ly's design service in order to be shared in the community.
If you produce visual content, you may wish to share it in the Visual.ly community for a few reasons. Obviously, doing so will help active members discover your content, but more importantly, Visual.ly's authority will help your content rank well in Google, further increasing its reach. Visual.ly also provides embed code for content they host, which makes it easier for bloggers and journalists to share your content.
Pinterest has been a smash hit social network where people share, curate, and discover images and video by “pinning” them to a pinboard. Members pin images from their computer or images they've found on the Internet, sometimes by using a “Pin It” button installed in a browser. Pinterest launched to the public in 2010 and has an audience of 60 million monthly visitors in the United States, according to ComScore, and 75 percent of them are using Pinterest via mobile devices. The audience is overwhelmingly female; by some accounts as many as 80 percent of members are women.
Pinterest has become a huge traffic driver—HubSpot, for example, gets more traffic from Pinterest than from Google+—and thus has become an appealing platform for marketers. Brands like Chobani, GE, and Peapod have avidly embraced Pinterest.
You should begin by adding a “Pin It” button to your website. That makes it easy for people to share things from your site on their pinboards. Each pin will include a link back the source. Those links are “no-follow links,” meaning they don't boost your ranking on search engines like Google. But they will nevertheless draw people to your website and help you build your audience.
The key to doing well on Pinterest is to find incredibly great images. That's easier for some marketers than for others. Selling gorgeous luxury goods? You've got it made. But what if you're selling something like B2B software, which isn't exactly the stuff of which beautiful photos are made? It's a challenge, but it's not insurmountable.
Here are some things you can pin:
Photos of your employees at a mixer or corporate event.- Photos of your customers.
- Strong visuals that ran with your blog posts and ebooks.
- Infographics and data charts.
- A video gallery of your executives speaking at events.
Another tactic is to create a pinboard for your customers to use. Clothing retailer ModCloth created a Guest Pinner Gallery, where designers can pin examples of their work that they think ModCloth customers might like.
Some brands host contests. For example, you might ask customers to create pinboards with photos of themselves using your product or service and explaining why they love your brand. Best pinboard wins a prize.
Another tactic: you can tag pins with hashtags. So if you're running a campaign on Twitter and Google+ that uses a hashtag, you can put that same hashtag on related pins on Pinterest.
Finally, as with everything else you do, remember to measure. Use your analytics tools to determine which pins drive the most traffic, and see what works and what doesn't.
Instagram is a massively popular photo-sharing and social networking service for mobile devices that lets people take photos, apply creative filters to them, and then share them on various social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Instagram also enables people to record and share short 15-second videos.
Instagram launched in 2010, and soon its rapid growth and popularity with a younger audience caught the attention of Facebook. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, in part to establish a stronger presence on mobile devices. Instagram now claims to have 150 million monthly active users. Its demographic skews young. More than 90 percent of users are under the age of 35, and 68 percent are women, according to Business Insider.
Instagram accepts advertising, and these spots can be extremely effective. Ben & Jerry's reached 9.8 million people aged 18 to 35 in just eight days, according to Business Insider. But there are other ways for marketers to use Instagram. As with Pinterest, you can use Instagram as a way to widen the reach of a social media campaign, using visual content to amplify your message.
The original version of Instagram handled only still photos, but in June 2013 the service added support for video. That move was in part a response to Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter introduced in January 2013 and which had started to steal the limelight from Instagram.
Brands like lululemon, Athletica, and Victoria's Secret were quick to pounce on Instagram's video feature. Fifteen seconds may not seem like much, but it's amazing what some creative folks have managed to do within these confines. Also keep in mind that if you've been working with Vine and its six-second limit, 15 seconds actually seems like a lot of time. Indeed, while Vines often look and feel like animated GIFs, with “InstaVids” some brands have been able to stretch a bit and create videos that have more of a narrative arc. Some videos feel like miniature TV commercials. You can use filters on Instagram video, just as you can with Instagram photos. Instagram has some editability features that Vine lacks.
Snapchat
Snapchat was created based on a deceptively simple idea: What if you had a photo-sharing app where pictures would vanish a few seconds after you opened them? At a time when people were obsessed with how much they were being tracked online, and concerned about the huge archives of photos and posts that we're all leaving around for eternity, the idea of a vanishing photo app was perhaps a stroke of genius.
You'd certainly think so based on the reception Snapchat received after it was launched in 2011. Snapchat won't say how many users it has, but it's been reported that the app has been downloaded 60 million times and that there are 30 million monthly active users. As of January 2014, Snapchat was drawing nearly 21 million monthly visitors in the United States alone, according to ComScore.
Snapchat even gave rise to a new category of social apps designed around content that is meant not to last. Suddenly, “ephemerality” was a hot new buzzword.
Snapchat lets you send images and video clips (up to 15 seconds long) to someone, and decide how long the content should remain visible—between 1 and 10 seconds.
The real appeal of Snapchat to marketers is the demographic profile of its audience. Snapchat's biggest adopters are 13 to 23 years old, and 70 percent of its users are female, according to AllThingsD.
Snapchat took some heat because it was seen as a “sexting tool” that teens could use to send naked pictures to each other, knowing the photos couldn't be shared or passed along. Some pundits believed that the presence of so much unsavory content would scare off advertisers. But apparently not, as brands have been testing the waters.
A frozen yogurt chain, 16 Handles, discovered that many of its customers were using Snapchat. The store sent out a promotion asking customers to take Snapchats of themselves eating 16 Handles yogurt and send the images to Love 16 Handles on Snapchat. Those who did received a coupon, which vanished in 10 seconds.
Taco Bell, known for its social media savvy, was among the first brands to embrace Snapchat, and used the service to announce the return of its “Beefy Crunch Burrito.” Taco Bell started out by asking its Twitter followers to friend Taco Bell on Snapchat in order to receive a secret announcement. The next day, Taco Bell sent out a photo advertising the Beefy Crunch Burrito.
In October 2013, Snapchat expanded its service by introducing Snapchat Stories, a feature that stitches snaps together and forms a narrative. Snaps live for 24 hours before vanishing.
Vine
Can you really tell a story in a six-second video clip? You might be surprised by what people have managed do with Vine, the mobile app introduced by Twitter in 2013. Vine has given rise to a new roster of web celebrities, including “BatDad,” the alter ego of Blake Wilson, a guy who became famous overnight after posting Vines of himself wearing a Batman mask in order to annoy and/or entertain his wife and kids.
There's even a Vine talent agency, Grape Story, run by social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk. Vaynerchuk spotted Vine's potential as a marketing platform and was among the first to seize the opportunity. The company is doing “ridiculously well,” Vaynerchuk said in 2013. “The engagement and awareness that we're driving for brands is ludicrous. This is like YouTube in 2008, or Twitter in 2007.”
Vaynerchuk says the extremely limited nature of a Vine “forces people to pay attention. It's the same thing with Snapchat, where you know it's disappearing.” And part of why Vines work is that the platform is still new, and the novelty itself is part of the appeal.
Vines have become a standard part of the social media arsenal at most big brands, including Toyota, Dove, Bacardi, Samsung, Lowe's, and Target. In September 2013, Dunkin' Donuts became the first brand to use Vine to create a television commercial—a five-second mini spot that aired on ESPN during the pre-game show for Monday Night Football.
Many marketers get overwhelmed or overly concerned with video production quality. But the quick upload, easy-to-use interface, and minimal emphasis on production quality is designed to encourage a little more experimentation. You can post “behind the scenes” videos of life at your office, quick product demos, or clips of a speaker to promote an upcoming webinar.
At HubSpot we used Vine to create a unique version of a regular event we call “Ask Me Anything,” where our CMO, Mike Volpe, took questions via Twitter and then responded via six-second Vine clips rather than by typing answers in Twitter. We've found that Vine is a great way to develop a deeper, more personal connection with your audience, and to transform silent followers into serious brand evangelists.