Last October 29, Twitter officially announced that they will be automatically showing images in your stream. Users will no longer have to click a link to “show” an image attached to a tweet.
It seemed inevitable that the social micro-blogging site would make this change sooner or later to keep up with their game-changing rivals such as Facebook and I0nstagram, both of which are more “photo-oriented”. Of course, this is also news for online marketers.
But does it really bear favorable fruits as far as lead generation goes?
HubSpot’s Britanny Leaning conducted a little A/B Testing to find out just that. In one group, she scheduled 18 regular tweets for their HubSpot account, and in another group she scheduled the exact same 18 tweets – but this time with a relevant image attached. She made sure the tweets were spread throughout a week-long duration around the same times of the day.
The result? To quote Leaning: “crystal clear”.
The test revealed that tweets with images have a 31% increase in clicks, 41% increase in retweets, 48% increase in favorites, 31% increase in visits, 33% increase in visitor-to-lead conversion rate, and 55% increase in leads.
Although this test was laid out in methodology and numbers, the logic behind this improvement is not rocket science. It has long been established that images are a huge influencer in attracting people into reading and clicking through content posted on social media and business blogs. Socialbakers.com revealed that 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook are photos.
The Twitter stream is traditionally just an endless feed of tweets which are 99% word-driven (emoticons make up the 1%). But all that has now changed. Imagine seeing a photo amongst a stream of words and how much impact that would bring into your chances of being noticed. Of course, as soon as everybody else starts posting images, the new challenge would be to post an image that would stand out.
Leaning also suggested that instead of a perfect square, you should be uploading an image with a 2:1 ratio (starting around 438×219 pixels for standard resolution). This ensures that the essential portions of the image are readily displayed when viewed from the stream.
If Twitter takes a huge chunk out of your entire online marketing campaign, you might want to stock up on images to go along with your tweets.
This content originally appeared at Sales and Marketing Solutions Blog.