A hands-on guide to visual press releases | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it

A common question I hear from PR professionals is, “How can I make my press releases more visual?”

Most PR pros understand that visual content is important, but for an industry that still relies heavily on pitch emails and text-based press releases, making the switch to visual PR can be daunting.

There are many reasons to include visual content in your press releases, but the biggest by far is that visual content gets shared more. A lot more. Facebook posts with images get 53 percent more likes and 104 percent more comments than the average post. Tweets with pictures are nearly twice as likely to be retweeted. Content with compelling images gets 94 percent more views than content without.

If that’s not enough to convince you that visual content matters, chew on this: A 2012 study by PR Newswire found that press releases with photos garnered nearly twice as many views as those with text alone. The more multimedia you add, the more that percentage grows. Press releases with text, photos, videos, and downloadable files received up to 9.7 times as many views as plain text releases....