Virtually every day it seems a new study comes out extolling the value of multimedia. The latest “Daily Dog” from Bulldog covered the following:
- Matter Communications released a survey of marketing professionals confirming the effectiveness of such visual tools as videos and infographics as key to increased engagement
- PR Newswire’s latest study shows that press releases containing multimedia attract nearly 10x more visibility
- Group Commerce released an e-commerce study that showed how media companies attract a far larger audience when employing multimedia
My question is: why is anyone surprised? Growing up in PR 30 years ago I was always taught that readers view a newspaper or magazine story in the following sequence:
- They first look at the photos
- Next they go to the headline
- Finally they read the story
So all those old sayings turned out to be true—especially the one that says….“a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Posting anything on Facebook without a photo is worthless. Same is true of Pinterest. Twitter and Instagram are fighting like cats and dogs over use of photo sharing, so much that Twitter launched a native photo filtering product today.
So for those of us in communications, use of compelling visuals are critical. To do less, borders on incompetence.