The beauty of Twitter is that it’s simple: 140 characters to tell the world what you’re doing.
Sometimes, however, adding another dimension to that simplicity can be even better.
If you use Twitter, you can significantly increase your engagement by incorporating images.
Twitter has enabled inline images since 2013, when it started letting users upload images directly to Twitter, creating a pic.twitter.com url.
These images have made a big difference to Twitter. Now, when you scroll through the Twitter feed, there are a lot more images to catch the eye. And those images definitely do work at gathering attention.
Statistics have shown that tweets with images receive more clicks, likes, and retweets. Buffer ran their own survey of their tweets with and without images. They found that tweets with images received 18% more clicks than those without, and tweets with images received 89% more favorites (this was before Twitter switched favorites to likes).
The biggest difference, however, was in retweets; tweets with images received a staggering 150% more retweets than imageless ones. These results only came from one user, but they still make an important point: images significantly boost engagement.
Luckily, others are catching on to the effectiveness of images on Twitter.
In May of last year, Hootsuite began letting users add images to their tweets right in the Hootsuite dashboard. This is good news for people who use Hootsuite to manage their social media marketing.
It’s not a big surprise that pictures boost engagement. Humans are, after all, very visually driven. It’s important to remember that images are still important on platforms, like Twitter, that are known for text. The more you can incorporate thoughtful images into your content, the better.
