15 Best Storytelling Visuals of 2015 [SlideShare]

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In 2000, the average human attention span was 12 seconds. Now, we only have 8 seconds to grab the attention from our audiences.

In today’s fierce competition for eyeballs, visuals are no longer just a nice-to-have component of a news release. Incorporating photos and other multimedia elements, including video, can help boost your press release’s impact and make your story stands out in this crowded digital space.

It’s the beginning of the year, which provides a great opportunity for PR Newswire to applaud the brands that have used eye-catching visuals to help readers visualize their news stories in 2015. In this slideshow, we shared an unranked selection of the 15 best attention-grabbing photos out of the 21,000+ news releases (Asia alone) we distributed last year:

Want to make 2016 the year of visual storytelling? Here are six tips for you:

1* Provide relevant visuals that help advance the key message of your news story. The photos should be aligned with your brand and can reflect the topic of your news release. Your visuals should serve to assist readers in better understanding the content of the release in a more vivid way.

2* Use high-quality, color-rich images that meet the recommended resolution levels for PCs, tablets and cellphones. At PR Newswire, we recommend our clients to provide photos that are at least 300dpi with a photo size not exceeding 10M.

3* When using multiple images, make sure they have a good contrast in terms of content. The content of each image should reflect different topics covered in the news release. Don’t provide two photos with similar angles and content.

4* Avoid using images that are clearly adverts. These kind of images will be quickly identified by the media, which is a big no-no.

5* Use a photo caption to help readers summarize the news release. Why? Besides it can contribute to improving search visibility, captions get read 4 times more than your body text, according to KissMetrics. More often, captions are also used by viewers for social sharing. Make it a good one!

6* Placement matters. Many website editors have suggested to place your photo below the first paragraph of the news release as it is easier to be noticed by readers. People naturally look at the image first, then the text. Strategically place your photo to draw them into your story.

For more storytelling tips, download our eBook 10 Tips to Leverage the Power of Storytelling to learn how to earn more media pickup and grab audience attention by using multimedia assets.

Eki Isabel Lau is the Marketing Executive for APAC (excluding China) at PR Newswire.