Ok, this is not about eyes. This post is about livening your Tweets up with images. You may have noticed that Twitter is displaying images and videos in Tweets to make the stream more like Tumblr and Facebook, with images streaming down where people attached them.
This change is aimed at making Twitter more visual. Tweets with images get retweeted and commented a lot more. This also helps Twitter compete with social media sites where there are a lot of images and video links.
There are a lot of new opportunities presented by this change. I am experimenting with adding pics to one in three of my Tweets. These, I hope, are relevant and interesting. The jury is out as to how they will be perceived by my followers, over 250,000 now on my different Twitter accounts, but I also believe this is an opportunity for compelling visual story telling about your offering.
Thinking visually means we have to find good content that you own the rights to - I paid for the above image earlier this month at Videoblocks - and thinking about how to select images that relate to our posts. Some subjects will be easy to find images for. Others will not.
Here are some suggestions for adding images:
1. Take more pictures of what's around you, your office, your desk, your colleagues, your output, your city.
2. Make changes to images using Ifranview or Paint.net at getpaint.net. They are both free, but the paint.net program allows you to add layers easily.
3. Make friends or buy services from photographers and animators and artists. Value their work. This will be good thing for everyone who is visually minded.
4. Consider creating your own videos using the Vine app on your phone, wideo.com for free animations or Animoto.com for edited videos. All these services are free.
5. Create visual story boards about your products or services. Take multiple pictures of the process you go through to create what you do. Then post the images.
This is a revolutionary change to Twitter. It will force us to make our Tweets more interesting. That's all good, in my opinion. If you have any other suggestions for adding visual content please comment below. Or simply let me know what you think about this change to your Twitter stream.
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