We’re quite familiar with this adage, right? And as far as we’re concerned, use of imagery to attract attention is all too self-evident. You’d even wonder why anyone would flesh it out at all as a social marketing best practice because, well, d’uh.
But I have noticed recently that some Twitter accounts I follow tend to get a little carried away with having every single tweet tacked on with an image. What are the drawbacks?
1 – It becomes a tad busy. Right? Suddenly your entire timeline is polluted with imagery and makes it ‘visually cumbersome’ to scroll through (especially when tweeting via mobile)
2 – Your sharing options become limited to ‘Retweet’ versus “Quote”, where you can actually add your own thought/commentary. Sometimes I simply take out the TwitPic link altogether
3 – Images are meant to complement text, not replace the power of words. If you get too image-happy with your tweets, the reader’s eyes start to automatically magnetize towards the image and not what you’ve actually tweeted. Depending on how well you choose and pair up your pics with your tweet, this may (or may not) be an ‘info digestion’ issue.
4 – Your timeline starts to look like it’s desperate for attention.
Indeed, the power of visual cues is not to be underestimated. However, the “Realm of The 140 Character Limit” typically defaults to text-based content. This is why many professionals in the field of communications, linguistics and psychology have long lauded how effective Twitter is at honing in our writing skills, at being clear and concise.
With the continual rise of many more ways to share content types on social channels, exactly how mindful and fastidious are you with ‘mixing it up’?
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