Visual Social Media Marketing: Harnessing Images, Instagram, Infographics, And Pinterest To Grow Your Business Online

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Visual Social Media Marketing by Krista Neher. The book was a solid, 100 pages, easy to read book with great content and lessons. She really knows the ins and outs of the vast and ever-changing world of social media. I used this book for my Social Media and Marketing class at Ohio University. As someone who wants to work in social media and specifically the marketing side, I felt that this book provided me with a lot of useful information for my career in social media. I never realized the power that pictures have on social media. The book explains that pictures get the most clicks and views of any content on the most popular social media sites. Neher really enforced that if you don’t have images in your digital marketing strategy, you will hurt yourself.

Because this book is about social media and the affects pictures have on audiences, Neher spent a couple chapters talking about Instagram and Pinterest. Businesses have taken advantage of social media sites such as Instagram and Pinterest because of the mass audience they have and are building on. Neher hits hard on how these two growing social media sites are changing the way businesses start interaction with their customers and improve traffic. They are using these sites to show and share pictures of their new products to customers. After reading the book I explored the social media sites of companies to see how effective these sites are for the business. I noticed clothing companies like J.C. Penny use their sites effectively to show pictures of their clothing to attract their audience. Neher doesn’t just focus on how these two sites are big on images. She discusses the other big names like Facebook and Twitter and how pictures influence and enhance the post and tweets on these and many other sites.

What I enjoyed about the book was how it focused more on providing images to assist and reinforce the message she was sending. She provides a wide variety of picture types and gives good advice on how to ensure that the message of the picture is clear and effective for the audience and drives the most traffic. Another quality of this book that I liked was the data research. This book is chalk full of great quantitative research found by studying how people behave on social media sites in relation to images. One of my favorite statistic stated that Instagram users snapped almost 1.3 million pictures when Hurricane Sandy occurred.

If I pulled out every great piece of information that I found in this book, I would be writing a novel. That just enhances the great amount information that was presented in this book. As someone who works on close to ten different social media sites, I will be applying a lot of Krista Neher’s knowledge to my social media work. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in social media, online marketing, and ways to improve social media for your business. Social media has taken over the world in a positive way and you will gain a lot of good information

I run a small business of making crafty items and selling them in person and online. I bought this book to get better insight on how to get a leg up in my industry because I felt like my social media presence was lacking. As it turns out, I was going about it the wrong way entirely. I need quality, relevant images in order to get noticed. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t have taken the time to read this material. With the short attention span of today’s culture, images are essentials to getting noticed online. I’m really glad I read this!

This book covers all of the major social networking sites as well as taking an inventory on one’s own social networking public image. There are also great resources provided by professionals in relevant industries that help to understand why the author guides readers towards certain tips. One thing that sets apart this work from others is the case studies and covering things I hadn’t even thought about that are crucial to getting noticed. I started implementing many of the tips immediately and it was effective in getting responses from my audience. A definite must-have for those who want to kick butt with their social media presence.