Visual Content

The old saying claims that a picture is worth a thousand words, but video ups the ante. According to Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. Now would be the time to begin converting static, word oriented content into visual mediums.

Consider this:

• It is estimated that 3.8 trillion photos were taken in all of human history until mid-2011, but 1 trillion photos were taken in 2015 alone.
• And that’s without counting the number of people making, viewing, or sharing videos [YouTube alone boasts over a billion users worldwide], Vines [40 million users], and gifs.
• Nearly 60% of all digital impressions are now driven by images.
• Facebook now claims to be the largest video-sharing site in the world.
• 70% of marketers are planning to increase their use of original visual assets this year, meaning these brands are not just repurposing images and video, but creating new visual content.
• Those who do emphasize visual content are rewarded with measurable impact on ROI and engagement metrics.
• Posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits and engagements than those without and elicit twice as many comments on average.
• Sixty-seven percent of consumers consider clear, detailed images to carry more weight than product information or customer ratings.
• Sight is our strongest sense: 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and 40% of nerve fibers to the brain are connected to the retina.
• As a result of this hardwiring, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. Not only are visuals processed faster, they are processed better.
• Some suggest that 80%–85% of our perception, learning, cognition, and other mental activities are mediated through vision.
• One interesting experiment showed that when someone hears a piece of information, they will remember only 10% of it three days later. Adding a picture to that information increases retention to 65%.
• In 2000, average customer attention span was estimated at 12 seconds, while today’s estimate is 8.25 seconds. Since it only takes humans about 0.25 seconds to process an image, we can still communicate much more information within these shortening attention spans with visual content.

Source: The Rise of Visual Content Online