Technology & Social Media – Forever 21’s Thread Screen

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Combining the power of technology and social media, Forever 21 has created a cool art installation that doubles as great brand exposure. Forever 21 hired Breakfast NY to create a Thread Screen that is made up of 6,400 spools of multi-colored thread. To see your photos as part of the Thread Screen, tag your Instagram photos using the hashtag #F21ThreadScreen and the device will re-create your image using the spools of thread. You can watch live footage of the machine here.

I decided to create one of my nephew and I absolutely love the results:

Just keep in mind it’s not instantaneous; it took 5 days from when I submitted the photo to create a thread screen.

*Photo credit: https://f21threadscreen.com/

 

21 Resources to Improve Your Visual Content [UPDATED]

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You’ve probably already figured out that visual content is valuable to marketing—it’s eye-catching, can be processed more quickly than text, and helps add variety to written content. But how do you choose the right images for your brand, avoid copyright infringement, or even create your own original visual content if you don’t have a design background? You’ll find the answers to these questions and more in the link roundup below.

Getting Started

The Science of Great Visuals

You shouldn’t have to wildly stab in the dark to come up with effective visuals for your website, blog, or social media channels. This post looks at design ideas such as the value of a simple layout, how fonts can match a brand message, and how certain colors evoke strong emotions and promote sharing.

How to Get More Engagement with Your Visual Content (Infographic)

After sharing some statistics on the value of visual content, this infographic dives into some actionable tips to help you create images that will make your audience take notice. One of the things I found most useful in this infographic was the breakdown of all the different image dimensions for the biggest social media platforms. Refer to this guide to avoid ever awkwardly cropping a social media photo again.

Want People to Share Your Visual Content? Avoid These 6 Common Mistakes

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to see examples of what not to do. This article covers some of the most common mistakes brands make in visual content marketing, from using images that don’t fit the message to obscuring images with too much text.

Tips for Creating a Visual Content Marketing Strategy

This slide show put together by the Content Marketing Institute relays what classic children’s stories can teach us about visual content marketing and how to implement these ideas in our strategies.

Useful Tools

100 Brilliant Color Combinations and How to Apply Them to Your Designs

If you’re an aspiring graphic designer, or even if you’re a non-designer tasked with creating visuals for your company, you may want to bookmark this post and reference it whenever you need to create a colorful image. The 100 palettes shared here are helpfully broken down into 4 categories: nature-inspired, food and drink-inspired, travel-inspired, and everyday item-inspired.

7 Best Visual Marketing Apps to Create Social Media Graphics

I don’t have a background in design, so whenever I need to create or edit images, I rely on free, user-friendly tools like Canva and Pixlr. You can learn about these and 5 other handy online design tools in this post.

The Ultimate List of Visual Content Tools

While it’s generally better to use original images whenever possible, this post contains a good list of sites where you can find high-quality, free images to incorporate in your content. It also has a list of easy-to-use design tools, including tools you can use to create and edit images directly from your smartphone or tablet.

Going Beyond the Basics

Animate Your Social Media Marketing with GIFs

Have you ever considered using GIFs (short, looped animations, usually from TV shows or movies) to add some humor to your marketing? Check out this post to learn how to use GIFs well and avoid copyright issues. (Note: This post says that you can’t share GIFs on Facebook, but Facebook recently issued an update that allows for GIFs in status updates.)

How to Create a Cinemagraph in 7 Easy Steps

Cinemagraphs—still photos with subtle, looped animation added in—look pretty cool and can definitely help your images stand out on social media. If you have Photoshop and a little bit of time, use this step-by-step guide to learn how to make your own cinemagraphs.

This Is Your Brain on Emojis

Whether you’re a fan of the trend or not, it’s becoming more and more common for people to communicate using tiny smiley faces, palm trees, hearts, and other emojis. Check out some examples of brands that get emojis right and read through tips to use emojis in your marketing without being obnoxious.

The Power of Instagram

How to Promote Your Business with Instagram

Instagram can be a great place for brand exposure, as long as you don’t take an overly sales-oriented approach. This article has some useful tips for how to fit in on Instagram and even collaborate with social influencers to build your following.

How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram

This Buffer blog post shares the value of posting on Instagram consistently, engaging with similar accounts, cross-promoting on other platforms, and more. And the nice thing about this guide is that all the tips are backed up by cold, hard research.

These Luxury Hotel Ads Use Instagram Shots Instead of Professional Photos

This is a great example of how user-generated photos can help build credibility. If you decide to go for this approach, just make sure you get permission to use the photos in your advertising!

Getting Social

How Much is Too Much Visual Content on Social Media?

It’s a question that’s worth thinking about before you start making every single social media update an animal meme. Marketing experts weigh in here, and the general conclusion seems to be that it’s important to have a variety of content types, and that images are appropriate as long as they are on-brand and do not distract from your message.

10 Simple Design Hacks to Increase Your Social Media Traffic with Visual Content

Some of my favorite tips from this Canva post are to think of your page headers as a billboard, make the most important terms biggest when using typography, and share visuals that encourage your audience to reply.

5 Visual Storytelling Tips to Power Your Content Marketing on Facebook

This post reminds us that videos on Facebook get twice the shares of text posts and links combined—so you’d better make sure you’re using images to tell compelling brand stories. You’ll get some helpful tips on how to do that here.

4 Visual Marketing Ideas to Boost Twitter Engagement

Twitter may not be as big on images as Instagram and Facebook, but you can still share images on the platform and should absolutely take advantage of that.

11 Killer Tips to Leverage SlideShare’s Power in Your Visual Content Marketing

SlideShare is often overlooked as a social platform, but with an average of 3 billion presentation views per month and more traffic from business owners than any other major social media site, it clearly has a lot of potential as a visual content marketing tool.

Top 5 SlideShare Marketing Tips

Want to learn how to generate leads from SlideShare? This is the article for you.

How to Get More from SlideShare

The advice in this post is worth listening to because it’s coming straight from the people behind SlideShare. This is a good place to start if you’re trying to figure out what kind of visual content does well on this platform.

Bonus Resource

70+ Free Image Sites to Make Your Content Dazzle

While I already shared SEMRush’s list of where to find free images online, I also wanted to share this even more expansive list. The more options you have for free images, the less likely you are to end up recycling the same overused stock photos in your online content. Just remember to review the licensing rules for each site and give credit where credit is due!

Know of any great articles on visual content that I missed? Let me know in the comments!

How Social Media Can Bring Peace of Mind

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A few months back, I relayed a tale of how our family dog, Norman, got loose and was found and returned to us thanks to the actions of alert and social media savvy neighbors.

Think of this tale as a cousin of sorts to that, albeit one more severe.

Facebook Reacquaints Old Friends

Coal City, Illinois, is a village about an hour southwest of Chicago. Having spent the occasional night there in the past, it’s a nice, quiet place where, compared to the metropolis 60 miles away, you can see the stars clearly, even on the occasional overcast night.

Coal City boasts a population of about 5,000. One amongst that is a longtime and much-loved friend of my wife and I from our college days. As is the case with many of our running buddies from back in the day, our main communication reignited a few years back when we caught up with each other on Facebook. Since then, there’s been the occasional birthday phone call which, inevitably, ends with the talks of getting together which, unfortunately (and also inevitably), hasn’t happened yet.

On June 23, both my wife and I were alerted to news that Coal City was hit hard the night before by a tornado. Unfortunately, this has become the norm, rather than the exception, in our home state in the last few years: a couple months back, one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded in the Land of Lincoln completely decimated a small town, resulting in multiple injuries and two deaths.

With early reports of multiple injuries and significant property damage, as well as the past tornadoes in mind, my wife ran to her cell phone to make sure our friend and her family – she has a terrific husband and two young sons – were okay. No luck: the call went straight to voice mail.

Knowing Loved Ones Are Ok – Even If They Don’t Answer the Phone

Our next move was to Facebook, which is where we first re-established contact with our friend and “like” each other’s photos and comments. A brief post from our friend – “everyone’s okay here, thank god” – came mid-morning, much to everyone’s relief.

Tales such as this are no longer something new – in the wake of disasters, checking social media sites  and waiting for text responses and e-mails for the whereabouts and conditions of loved ones is as much a knee-jerk reaction as picking up the phone.  In fact, it’s somewhat amusing how, only a few short years ago, contacting loved ones in the eye of adversity via new media was something to marvel at: I remember several news stories centered around families reunited thanks to a post or a tweet, and how amazing this was.

As amusing as these stories from not so long ago may be now, one thing they’ll likely continue to get right is the worry friends and family feel in that space between hearing about the incident and receiving the “all clear” confirmation. Social media, again, has played a vital role in easing our worry regarding our friend and her family.

Yet there’s one aspect here that remains unfulfilled: it’s time to actually make time to see each other outside of posts and phone calls. Despite all the benefits social media allows for, there’s nothing that will ever compare to quality time with old friends.