As we scroll through our social media feeds, we’re inundated with videos, photos, and articles.
How those posts are written, the images or videos, and the emotions they elicit all play a role in whether or not we click and engage with that post.
According to the study Picture This: The Influence of Emotionally Valenced Images, On Attention, Selection, and Sharing of Social Media News, posts containing positive images elicited a higher level of visual attention than those with negative or no images, which led to higher intentions to click and share posts with positive images.
This is important because while negative images may have an added shock value and garner attention, it’s a cheap and ineffective way to get attention on your social media profiles.
The best content connects with your audience in both an informative and emotional way. This creates a mutual understanding between your brand and the people consuming your content.
Participants in the study viewed a series of 29 social media posts of news stories, each of which was either paired with no image, a positively valenced image, or a negatively valenced image.
Joe Gullo