We've all heard the old expression "a picture is worth a thousand words," and most of the time we can probably all agree that this is true. For social media marketing purposes, however, this is not only true, but also essential in order to capture an audiences' attention and make a lasting impression.

Human beings have always communicated visually. Ever since we lived in caves, long before verbal languages existed, we painted symbols and pictures of animals on cave walls to tell each other stories through images. As a matter of fact, the written forms of our world's different languages were originally derived from the need to tell stories and pass on knowledge visually, when the spoken words weren't enough.

As our society developed, technology became a part of our everyday life. As a result of the "information overload" modern minds must weed through each day, our attention spans have become limited to enable us to make quicker decisions and take multiple actions. We have learned to skim through vast amounts of content, extracting only what is of immediate interest to us.

When it comes to social media, people will make very quick decisions on whether or not to like, follow, share, comment, re-tweet or pin a post within the first few seconds of seeing it. If the post doesn't speak to them, they'll keep scrolling. A long social media post without any visuals will most likely be ignored as the reader may feel overwhelmed visually by the amount of content it contains. Adding an image to that same post will break up the text and result in a much higher engagement from followers. Even using text-based images like quotes, infographics or memes will capture people's attention more effectively than if that same text was written in a post without visuals.

The use of images and video clips has been done for years in marketing so it's only natural that this attention-getting tool would transfer over to social media marketing as well. With built-in cameras on today's smartphones and the ability to easily capture photos and videos, image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest have grown and become more and more popular proving that users support visual communication.

People have gone from blogs to microblogs to multimedia microblogs, and as Detavio Samuels, owner of marketing business Global Hue, points out: "The only thing shorter than a tweet or a post is a picture."

Sometimes words aren't even necessary... because a picture truly is worth more than a thousand words!