I registered for Donna Moritz from Socially Sorted’s Visual Marketing Webinar earlier this month and while I got many little gems from listening to Donna – there was one element that really stood out for me. She shared the things that she said applies to what good visual marketing messages should cover, i.e. every image or visual message you put together should do three things:

1. Attract Attention
2. Entice Action
3. Inspire Advocacy

Perhaps you will have gathered from either knowing me or by way of my blog that I love the rule of three. Its nifty, short, sweet, cuts to the chase and is easy to remember.

So – I was really pleased when Donna shared these three points with us. They also gave me the impetus to write this post to give you my “two cents worth” on these three because I think that they are most definitely just as applicable to apply to your messages in general on social media (visual or not).

Attract Attention

While you may strive for to create the next BIG viral Facebook post, tweet, YouTube video, Instagram picture or Vine…let’s be honest – the chances of that happening are pretty slim.  I have every faith in your creative ability – don’t get me wrong – but…the virality of a post lies in the perception of humour, wit, pain or opinion of your audiences. And that my friend – is the tricky part. What is catchy today – may not be catchy tomorrow.

So keep your “attractive” element in your social media messages to mixing your messages up with text, image, links and video. Attractive in a general sense means: always “speak” to your audience – create messages that will pull their eye, make them click…and generally be more interested in you. With visual messages (as Donna would say) – the design of your message must pull the reader’s eye: make easy-to-digest visual nuggets.

Entice Action

I love the word “entice”…it makes me think: coax with treats. So – if you think of it in that way, think of what you can create as a compelling reason for someone to take action. Build this into your message – whether text, visual or other. Social media communication is about a two-way dialogue and eliciting a response from your audience (even if that is just clicking “like”; “share”; “comment”; “favourite”; “reply”; etc.). Also a well-designed visual message will be shared many, many times – so you have a better chance of viral if you choose a visual design. (Donna has many examples she shares of her own – especially clever infographics – like the one she did for Amy Porterfield on The 10 Commandments of Using Pinterest for Business.)

Inspire Advocacy

At the end of the day, hopefully we all have the motivation to use the medium of social media platforms to educate, inform and most importantly help our audiences with the challenges that we specialise in solving. So – by producing great content…the ultimate goal is for our audiences to share that content with their audiences and so on. Keep this in mind when you create or curate content – you want to build a loyal audience who love what you provide them, and all they want to do is tell people about you; what you share; and what you do. Advocacy is a posh word for people-shouting-out-about-you-without-the-need-for-reward-in-doing-so.

A big shout out to Donna and thank you for the inspiration for this post! You can follow her at @SociallySorted, find her on Facebook or go to her website.

Please do share this three nuggets to friends and colleagues who you think could do with applying them to their social media content strategy. If you have an example of a great piece of content – please do share it below – I would love to see it. I collect great social content examples to use in training – so you’d be helping me out if you did!