It’s virtually impossible to be successful on social media as a brand without some form of visual content.

Photos, not surprisingly, are often at the center of such success.

So being, I decided to take look across my data from golf resorts, but also beach and mountain resorts, to answer two simple questions about how these visual bits of content perform on social networks.

1) Photos Like Rate by Site
My first question was how like rate (or fav rate, +1 rate, etc.) compares for photos uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+. Here’s what I found looking at a sample of over 225,000 resort photos.

Photo-focused Instagram is the clear winner for resorts, but what surprised me was that Twitter was dead last – getting 1/3 as many likes as resort photos posted to Google+.

2) Twitter Click Rate by Photo / No Photo
I’ve seen a handful of a marketers declare that tweets with photos get more link clicks. But each of their data sets was sadly small (as in a single account, 36 tweets for one analysis). So, I compared Bitly click rates for 4,000 tweets from 100 different resorts.

Surprisingly, resort tweets with photos actually got fewer clicks that those without. While logic says photos would draw more attention to the tweet, perhaps they are better at drawing attention to just the photo, distracting the viewer from the actual tweet itself.

Simple, Actionable
While the benchmarks, for me, have been a helpful reminder when a Twitter photo performs poorly in comparison to the same photo posted to Instagram, the second chart was the most helpful for me personally.

When you want clicks on a link, unless the context is lost without it, a photo appears to not be the clever “get more clicks” hack some marketers think it is.

Instead, seems the best approach is to just write a solid tweet and let the message do its job.

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