WordPress Tips

It’s a proven fact: adding images to your social media posts boosts traffic and encourages engagement with your visitors. This same phenomenon works for your blogs as well.

The 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner found that 32% of marketers think images are the most important content to use. They offer increasing value and ROI for blogs when they are used effectively.

People scrolling through endless text on social networks favor images. It breaks the monotony. They also encourage increased sharing and catch the visitor’s attention, which should be your primary goals with your blog.

Here are three of the most effective tips for creating blog images that encourage sharing.

Implement SEO

Your blog images won’t attract attention if they aren’t optimized for SEO just like every other type of content marketing. This is frequently overlooked because many bloggers don’t understand the value of optimizing images for SEO.

File name: What you name your image file matters. Label all your images appropriately.
Alt text: This is text that will show up if the image doesn’t and should include the target keyword of your blog post. Search engines crawl this text so it’s important to be descriptive.
Caption: This is so users can scan the page with ease.
Format: The most common are JPG, PNG, and GIF. For photos, use JPG. For graphics or images that need a higher resolution, use PNG, and for smaller image sizes, use GIF.

Optimize Large Files

You need to ensure your image size doesn’t negatively impact how your web pages load. Visitors want a seamless UX when browsing your blog, and they want to view your posts without problems.

Google research demonstrates that 53% of visitors abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Page speed also is a key factor in Google’s algorithms for ranking your site. Three seconds is all it takes to lose a potential follower.

You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to make sure your site is loading quickly. And, you can use image optimizers such as TinyJPG or JPEGMini to decrease the file size and speed up loading time.

You will increase your chances of featuring your blog images efficiently and promote sharing to different social media and platforms with this one key step. However, clean design still prevails. Don’t clutter your blog posts with too many images.

Enable Social Sharing

Make it super simple for visitors to share your images. One quick click of a button should be all it takes to share your images across social media. Add social sharing buttons to your images and blog posts. Make them easy to notice and not bogged down by text on the page. WP Social Sharing and Social Warfare are popular, free plugins that make sharing images simple and responsive. Plus, they are lightweight, so they won’t slow down your blog. Both tools support a variety of social networks and placement options.

You can play around with the sharing buttons to see which attract more attention. By working with the colors, copy, and positioning of the buttons, you can determine which encourage more engagement and traffic.

Final Thoughts

Creating shareable blog images means implementing SEO, inserting social sharing buttons to make it easy for visitors to engage, and streamlining your image optimization process. It’s not easy to gain traction when the internet is overflowing with ambitious bloggers and business owners trying to make it on top. But if you rethink how to make your content — especially images — shareable, you open up a new door to driving traffic and boosting engagement for your blog.