Web posts best have images attached: inaugural Baltimore Social Media Group meetup [VIDEO]

A packed room of more than 40 people turned up at El Rodeo Tex-Mex Cantina and Grill in Towson on Tuesday evening for the first-ever Baltimore Social Media Group meetup.
Organized by Jim Keeney, a senior consultant at web design company NavigationArts, and AK Stout, the owner of Saying It Social, the first meetup focused on the “visual web.” Or, as Stout explained it in her presentation, the need to have images in all posts on social media as a way to “rise above the noise.”

Watch AK Stout discuss using imagery on the social web:
http://www.youtube.com/v/ZseUOgDHvuU?version=3&hl=en_US
Stout laid out several reasons in her presentation as to why images are important to include as often as possible in posts on Facebook and Twitter:

• Images are stored in the brain’s longterm memory, which helps people retain the information associated with them.
• People can process images 60,000 times faster than they can process text.
• Images serve as appeals to people’s emotions (especially, Stout said, if those images include puppies or babies)
• Thanks to Facebook’s incessant need to make itself over, the EdgeRank algorithm will play nice with your posts if it spots images in them.

Watch Stout discuss the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm:
http://www.youtube.com/v/heIOL_kQvR0?version=3&hl=en_US