A major challenge for any company that champions its internal blog is keeping it fresh and engaging for its community members. Images can breathe life into a blog and without them, the content can feel stale and the message becomes less effective.
The virtues of images, such as photographs, infographics and videos, are already understood in the world of marketing but internally they can be just as effective. From helping staff understand new processes or assisting with training to company-wide celebrations and product demonstrations, let’s look at why your company blog needs images.
The world we live in today is much more visual than it once was, and images like emojis, GIFs and videos are commonplace in everyday communications. Companies don’t have to restrict their tone of voice, particularly for internal communications, to formal language. Instead, they can embrace the attention-grabbing techniques of social media platforms to ensure staff are enjoying and engaging with their internal blogs. The same principle of bringing audience engagement or participation in customer relations is just as effective when relating to employees.
Evidence shows that visual content gets the most shares and views when compared to ‘simple’ plain-text posts. So don’t be afraid when creating content exclusively for your internal blog to let your creativity shine through and use as many media tools at your disposal for more engagement.
Depending on the size of your company, there may be employees who don’t interact with your products or services. Using high-quality images like photographs, diagrams and videos can help explain and act as a tutorial for them to better comprehend what the company is doing. This is ideal for someone in a customer-facing or HR role who may not be so involved in the technical side of the business.
Diagrams, in particular, are useful for those who skim-read or who don’t have the time to digest a wall of text. Whether that is by labeling aspects of a product to highlight its features or a flowchart to explain a new process, they all allow for faster and more effective understanding.
Rather than spamming people with emails, which can become overwhelming, companies are utilising internal blogs for that knowledge sharing. With team members free to write about their role in the company, their personal experiences, and their expertise, blogs allow for a more detailed insight. Similar to bringing information about products and services to life, powerful visuals in an internal blog can support the knowledge-sharing aspect.
The idea of taking the right image or creating a video for an internal blog or announcement might seem like a lot of work but it doesn’t have to be. Learning the basics can quickly advance your skills at becoming a successful visual storyteller. For a photographer, this might simply mean understanding the three elements of the exposure triangle, while videos meant purely for your staff and colleagues don’t need the production touches of Steven Spielberg! Instead, using screen-recording tools to demonstrate the information you perhaps were going to send in an email allows you to quickly convey your message.
This can not only reduce the need for email chains but also encourages fewer meetings too as staff can simply check the internal blog for the information they need in a bite-sized format. Better yet, this internal blog can be referred to as time goes by, helping to onboard new starters more quickly and improving the training initiatives of a company.
When it comes to a company’s progress, everyone must be heading in the same direction and singing from the same sheet. As such, an internal blog’s images can act as a way to reinforce the central message a company wishes to convey to its staff and the outside world.
Reinforcing your central message can come in different forms, so you should always welcome variety in your photography while maintaining your brand voice throughout. This helps to reinforce concepts and branding tone while improving engagement and showing, rather than telling, your staff about the latest company news.
If you are not going to publish your blog on your website, or you wish to find images for a presentation, then it’s okay to pick whatever you like. You won’t have to worry about copyright infringements on say an internal blog that is on a company Intranet.
But if you are publishing your internal blogs online then copyright infringement will be possible. Consider using copyright or royalty-free images but the nature of this ‘stock’ content is prohibitive and limited in effectively telling the story you want.
When staff need to find a piece of information, they can waste vital time trawling through emails or company documents to find it. However, an internal blog focusing on information sharing is a valued resource, turning messages into content.
Trying to find an update that was announced through internal communication tools like Slack or Teams can be exhausting, and in some cases, they are lost forever if the user leaves the chat or company. But, the internal blog that is equipped with instructional videos, infographics, and flowchart demonstrations quickly becomes a hub for information.
Joining a new company can be a daunting experience for some. Everyone already established in the company knows what they are doing, who the right people to speak to for certain things are, and a sense of belonging and purpose.
Of course, new starters understand it takes time to integrate into a team but an internal blog can act as a great way to welcome and improve bonds to the company. Images and videos including team members can help to build bonds and put faces to names while reading personal entries on an internal blog.
Given that some people keep their social interactions mostly limited to those in their team, the more engaging an internal blog post can be with the inclusion of images, the more it can spark conversations among staff across different teams.
As internal blog posts don’t have to be solely focused on professional interests, staff can showcase their interests and talents better through imagery to leave a lasting impact on their colleagues. Companies may wish to encourage a ‘show and tell’ type post from each member of the team when they join to help them integrate into the company better.
The better an onboarding experience is for a member of staff, the more likely they are to stick around. Research has found that organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
The freedom that comes with an internal blog means that companies can be more experimental or rough around the edges than they would with a blog intended for customers. Staff are free to show their personalities more and in the case of videos, can speak as they normally would rather than worrying about appealing to key demographics.
Progress pictures on developmental issues are a great idea to keep everyone in the loop while avoiding publishing them to the public to keep things under wraps. As our behaviours and expectations change, video is a must for an internal blog to maintain engagement and most importantly, to ensure staff actually pay attention.
Images are a powerful tool at the disposal of companies not just for marketing purposes but for inspiring, motivating, and engaging with their staff. From improving processes through detailed explanations (that can be digested faster) to helping new staff onboard faster and strengthening your company message, images should be a focal point of your internal blog.