This is a guest post from Alison Battisby a Social Media Consultant, blogger and speaker.  You can learn more about her work and clientele here and follower her on twitter: @alisonbattisby.

One of the biggest social media trends of the moment is image-centric marketing, rather than traditional text-based marketing. Without images, and the right use of images, your social media campaign will suffer. Thinking more strategically about the images you use is a very low cost approach and is something you can action almost immediately.

Images will help you to promote your event to new audiences through social media, and will help to keep your attendants interested in your upcoming events.

Social media users want to understand your key message without having to read pages of text, or even paragraphs. In fact social media users typically scroll through their newsfeeds so quickly on tablets and phones that they will often ignore your post unless you are using an engaging image.

I’d encourage you to take what I call a Facebook Newsfeed Test. Next time you are logged into Facebook, scroll down your newsfeed really quickly and stop at the first image that catches your attention. More often than not, it will be a unique, colourful image that contains people. Just take a look at the example from STA Travel; they have subtly included their logo in the bottom left hand corner too.

One of the most common activities Facebook users take part in is uploading and commenting on photos. This was the purpose it was invented for, back in 2004 in a dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg. If you ask anyone why they use Facebook, a popular reason is to look at and share pictures of loved ones and friends.

If you can include pictures of people in your images, then they are ultimately going to be more interesting to your target audience. Boring stock images without any people in it will be ignored. Ideally you will use images of people at your past events, having a great time and showing your target audience what they could be missing out on if they don’t attend your next event. Secret Cinema does this very well on Facebook.

Bright images are going to catch your audience’s eye – so think about the colours and shades you are using. Also try to use unique images, that have not been seen before on your website or any offline marketing. People join Facebook Pages to get exclusives and behind the scenes content, so if you are going to show them images they have seen hundreds of times then you won’t see results. I see this mistake made commonly with ecommerce sites; they post product imagery from their websites rather than showing their products being used and enjoyed by people.

Twitter now allows for images to be expanded in the newsfeed.

You can upload up to four images alongside a tweet, and Twitter will automatically arrange them into an attractive collage. Telegraph Travel does this regularly with holiday destinations.

Twitter Cards allow you to add rich media to your tweets, including an image, video and a call to action button. They are relatively straightforward to create, all you need to have is access to the Twitter Ads platform. This is free to do, just sign up, and you don’t need to commit credit card details.

Finally, editing your images to the correct dimensions for each social media platform is key. You don’t want any important part of your image to be cropped out, or for a logo or hashtag to be missed. The current dimensions for an image in a Facebook post are 1200 x 1200 pixels. For Twitter you need 440 x 220 pixels.

You don’t need to be a design whizz to mock up great images to promote your event either. I use a free image editing website called Canva, which allows you to create beautiful flyers and collages from your existing pictures or from their huge bank of stock photos. If you are struggling to find photos, try iStock, Getty or Creative Commons – but I’d recommend trying to take your own at your events. It gives a much more authentic feel, and it’s the cheapest option!

If you liked this post, you should check out our giant list of 102 great event marketing tools for promoting your event like a pro!

If you’d like more great tips like these, you should sign up for our next live event ‘Event Marketing for Startups’ at Campus London, Wed 12th Nov.

More details and register your free place here.