One of the most beloved characters written and brought to life was Lewis Carroll's Alice in "Alice in Wonderland". Being a fictional author bringing another land to life, he had to write and create images for the imaginations of those who read the tale. Alice thinks matter-of-factly in the opening chapter: “'And what good is a book,' Alice thought, 'without pictures or conversations?'” Now, imagine the entire online population with the same mindset as Alice. No one wants to read a blog post anymore if it doesn't have an image in it. Business owners, if you haven't already; it's time to go straight down the rabbit hole of Visual Content Marketing because otherwise your story won't be heard or read. That's the simple truth, according to this infographic from QuickSprout it shows that social network users spend an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on Pinterest versus just 12.1 minutes on Facebook! This means that users spend more time looking at images than socializing with Facebook friends. Social media users devour images, retain them, and associate with them much more easily than they do text-based content. Does it mean abandoning all text-based content strategies? Not at all, it means writing content that can be reused in different forms of images to be shared on all social networks. Image ideas to use and add to your content: • Infographics • YouTube Video Channel • Pinterest Product Listings • Instagram • Facts and Figures on Charts or Graphs • Custom Brand Photos One of the most important things a digital marketer, social media manager or even an entrepreneur has to do is measure the success of a post. What does it entail? It means experimenting and looking at each post; for example, post a piece of information… in the center of the sheet… or a landing page or your website. At the end of the day, visual content shared on social sites has the sole purpose of driving referral traffic to the website. Make sure the website design keeps the viewer engaged once they get there; otherwise, what was the point of spending so much time creating visual content? Bottom line… People gravitate towards images, especially well-designed, thoughtful, beautiful images, and want to share them with others. Use Pinterest boards and the Pin It button on each blog post to allow visitors to easily share and pin their posts to their boards. In a recent study, Pinterest was shown to attract more referrals to publishers than any other social network. Take the time to design the right images, create compelling content that tells the brand story in such an engaging way that people won't help but want to know more about the company.