A Few Tips for Adding Visual Content to Social Media

Visual content has wholly transformed social media, and now just simple text won’t be enough to captivate the visitor’s attention. According to an article on Raga.com, visitors will retain 80 percent of what they see and 20 percent of what they read. In addition to that, people can process visuals a lot more rapidly than text. Are you still not convinced? Around 65 percent of people are visual learners. These facts alone show the importance of visual content, so if you are not creating engaging visual content for your visitors, then you are losing out on potential revenue! Here are a few tips to keep in mind when adding visual content to your social media channels.

Social media is a great place to showcase exceptional hotel images, especially when it comes to your cover photo. Facebook, and Twitter all offer a large cover photo section on their profiles. Hoteliers should be prepared with excellent photos taken with a high-quality camera. Be sure to set a minimum resolution for all the photos taken so that the quality is not diminished. If the picture is lacking color, there are plenty of options such as Photoshop and Apps on the phone to help filter and enhance your photo to fit the theme accordingly. Low-quality images can give the impression that the hotel is cheap and unappealing, so low-quality photos should not be used because this can turn visitors away. But remember, though it is crucial to showcase high-quality images, this does not mean that you should portray your hotel in an untrue light.

There two types of visual content to focus on are images and videos. For social media channels such as Twitter, users are more likely to re-tweet pictures than videos. However, that does not mean hotels should focus on uploading just images onto their social media channels. While photographs can initially attract a visitor to stay on the channel, videos can give a better feel of the atmosphere and surroundings of the hotel. A good quality video for a hotel can provide a simple tour of the hotel and useful information, allowing visitors to learn more about the hotel and what it can provide for their customers.

While running a hotel is a business, that doesn’t mean you can’t include the guests that have stayed in your hotel previously! Depending on the social media channel, several ways can be used to share this user-generated visual content with visitors. Hotels can create a specific hashtag for social media users so that they may use that hashtag when they are sharing their images. That way, visitors can quickly look through that hashtag and see all of the images from previous guests. The official hotel team who handles social media can also re-post these images onto their social media channels as well. For Twitter, hotels can re-tweet photos from guests that have been tweeted at them. This can encourage more guests to create user-generated content. While sharing/re-tweeting guest images on social media is perfectly fine, be sure to ask permission if you wish to share these images on different channels.

Adding an image to every social media post can go a long way. These are just a few things to keep in mind when adding visual content to social media channels. What other tips do you think hoteliers could use when adding visual content onto their social media channels?