It used to be that content was king on the Web; have a great blog or terrific content on your website and that was enough. Search engines loved it and so did customers. Now with devices galore, short reader attention spans, and readers in the Instagram and selfie generation, blogs and website have to cater to a full bodied rich media experience.
Gone are the days of blogs without images.
Gone are the days when only a few businesses did video.
Gone are the days when content all alone was enough.
Now we need…
● Images on every blog post and some have gone crazy by making the image huge it fills the entire computer screen.
● Do a Facebook update, wow, better make sure there’s a good image on the page so Facebook will grab it as a thumbnail as we all know that readers won’t even look at an update that is not visually interesting.
● Doing a Twitter update, yikes, did you add a Twitter pic link?
● Got a new product. Better whip out your smartphone and do a quick YouTube video of you demonstrating it and upload it and then link it to your website.
Although in some cases images really add nicely to content, it almost seems like the pendulum is swinging too far. Pretty soon websites will look like toddler chunky reading books with images and only a few words of content.
Although a picture may be worth 1,000 words, we still really NEED words in our online content to convey a full thoughtful and persuasive message.