Relationship between Social Media and Visual Communication

Not only TikTok! All social networks take advantage of visual communication to transmit messages and information to the whole world.

People worldwide communicate daily, all the time, through verbal or visual communication (Fahmy, Bock, & Wanta, 2014), and social networks allow communication to be natural and straightforward.

Visual communication is vital in social networks since, for many people, images and visual content is the easiest universal language to understand and process. People unconsciously process images on their social networks like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube all the time. Even if they don't realize it, everything they see on social networks impacts their lives.

All people who use social networks are exposed to all types of content; for this reason, marketers take advantage of the use of these platforms to easily reach users.

In the image on the right, you can see some examples of large companies that promote themselves on different social networks (in this case, TikTok). It can be seen that all of them have thousands of followers; this is due to social networks allowing the reach of followers to be faster and easier.

Visual communication is widely utilized in advertising because it has the ability to affect the behaviour of consumers as well changing their shopping habits (Kumar & Al-Zubaidi, 2014). Visual communication plays an important role here because every content creator uses creative tools on different social networks to create interesting and creative content that catches the attention of consumers.

Every social network is different. Facebook has a more friendly and easy-to-use approach, where people usually post text and images, and users can easily find images or memes. Instagram, for its part, focuses mainly on the content of images, stories, and reels. TikTok is focused on videos and is recognized for its algorithm to find videos related to the interests of each user. Twitter is a more 'relaxed' social network and one where tweets easily go viral.

Every social network is different, with similar purposes; however, they share the same principle of sharing information through visual communication.

REFERENCES:

R. Alarabi (2019). Relationships between visual communication on social media and consumer behaviour of working women in Jordan. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/relationships-between-visual-communication-social-media-al-arabi