Images are Eating the Web - The Rise of Authentic Visual Content
Seeing is believing. Whether we like it or not, we always judge by appearances - judging whether a fashion statement is appealing by looking how my friend looks, judging a book by its cover, judging a place to explore by seeing pictures, and judging a company by its website. We rely on visual content because our brains are wired to - we read no more than 20% of text in any page.
The web has also gone through a fundamental shift - from text web to pixel web. The growth of the visual web hinges on a few key developments.
1. THE EXPLOSION OF VISUAL CONTENT
Customer photos are the most authentic and compelling brand assets available today. Thanks to the mass adoption of smartphones and visual networks like Instagram, they are also incredibly abundant.
500 million photos were shared per day in 2013 and 1.8 billion photos are being shared per day in 2014. That’s 75 million per hour, 1.25 million per minute and 20,833 per second.
Until recently, few brands understood the true breadth and depth of the customer photo opportunity, but nowadays more and more brands use a unique interplay of owned and earned visual content in their commerce experience.
2. SOCIAL PROOF HAS GONE VISUAL
Savvy audiences have learned to tell the difference between a studio photo shoot and an authentic experience. While both owned and earned visuals still have a place in your branding strategy, user generated visual content endorsing your products reinforce your emotional connection and tells the story of your brand as a social-first, mobile-first entity. Nielsen statistics indicate that nearly two thirds of us make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from other consumers.
3. IMAGES WILL OVERTAKE TEXT AND UGC WILL SURPASS PUBLISHED CONTENT
Because attractive images on the Web increases propensity to share and collect, it is breeding a new tribe of highly engaged brand advocates and influential users. Visual web democratizes influence. Users don’t have to be celebrities to cast influence. They just have to have taste. Taste is intent.
Instagram got 5 million photo uploads for #thanksgiving only only Thanksgiving Day.
400 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every day
Etsy gets 100,000 pins daily on Pinterest
Facebook made the web social. Instagram created a photo based social network. Pinterest is creating a network of sharable and ownable visual hyperlinks i.e images that are connected to web pages. Pinterest makes the social web, visual.
4. VISUAL EARNED CONTENT IS MONETIZABLE.
Visual Web helps brands and social enterprises achieve 2 key goals:
Generate traffic and sales - any owned and earned user-generated content can be made shoppable using the right friction-free approach.
Generate hyper brand engagement – Via social hubs, photo galleries and contests, retail displays, unique UG Content widgets and innovative mashups of owned and earned content.
However, scaling user-generated content comes with a troika of challenges - Speed of garnering user rights, Scale of Content and Managing Automated Brand Consistency.
Cloudaria believes that brands, retailers and forward-looking marketers can overcome these challenges while also improving sales and engagement —and nearly every aspect of the brand experience—by collecting, curating and creatively showcasing fresh, authentic visual content and making it shoppable.
Every new consumer behavior trend brings with it significant challenges and incredible opportunities. By embracing these opportunities, brands become more social, and migrate from transactional relationships with consumers to emotional relationships with fans. Visual storytelling helps your shape the brand's voice and take community conversations a few notches further.
For further details on how we can help your brand enable visual conversations and commerce at scale, please get in touch with us.
