Goldfish have a nine-second attention span. The average human being now has an eight-second attention span. Does this signal the end of human supremacy? Are we no greater than a gulping, orange fish? No! This heralds a chance to capitalize on the power of images.

People’s attention spans are so short because words alone are boring. We need pictures— photographs in particular—to keep us engaged. Pictures help illustrate a story and make it easily accessible without putting too much strain on the viewer’s processing abilities.

Content marketers take note: visual graphics are just one remove from reality, and thereby very easy for the brain to process. Metrics supporting this include:

Social media posts with visuals deliver 180% greater engagement.
Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets.
Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.
Images make up 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook (up from 85% in 2012).
Articles that contain images get 94% more views than articles without.
Users clicking on photos of real people are 200% as likely to convert to a sale.
Blogs that integrate video attract 300% more inbound links.
Video is 53 times more likely to generate a first-page Google ranking.

Check out this infographic that maps out all the benefits of marketing through visual storytelling!

See SocialMediaToday for more!