Adding Visuals To Social Posts: 5 Reasons, 15 Ideas, 5 Tutorials & 15 Tools

Social media can be an excellent marketing channel for authors, but only if you can make your content “pop” and get noticed amid millions of daily posts. The best way to do this is to provide engaging content that is relevant to your followers and add visual elements such as a photos, videos, GIFs, infographics, mind maps or illustrations.

5 Reasons Why You Should Add Visual Elements to Your Social Posts:

1. Images increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%
2. 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated
3. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images
4. Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content
5. For more statistics on the power of visual, visit Hubspot’s blog on this topic 

​

15 Author Friendly Ideas on How To Add Visual Elements to Your Social Posts:

1. Share a visually optimized excerpt from you book with a Bublish book bubble
2. Add an image of your book cover
3. Take a short, pithy quote from your book and make it into an image
4. Create a clever infographic with your characters, plot or setting
5. Make a funny GIF of yourself encountering writers block or drinking too much coffee to meet a writing goal
6. Share an image of your book in a relevant, interesting setting
7. Create a short video of yourself reading a scene from your book and sharing what inspired you to write it
8. Pair up with another author for a quick video interview
9. Share visual quotes from authors who inspired your work
10. Share photos of outfits your character might where, places they might frequent, or activities they might do
11. Share photos of you in your “writing spot,” doing research on your book, signing books at conferences, etc
12. Make a SlideShare with graphics for your book (great for non-fiction)
13. Create a simple book trailer
14. Chart a visual mind map of your plot or character relationships
15. Animate a scene from your book (great for children’s authors)​

Click Here to Get Your Visual Marketing Cheat Sheet

5 “How To” Posts on Adding Visuals to Your Social Posts:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. WordPress (for blog posts)
4. Instagram
5. Google+ ​

15 Tools for Creating Visual Elements to Share on Social Media: