HOW WILL THE SOCIAL MEDIA MONETIZE TEXT BASED ADVERTISEMENTS?

Remember the childhood school activity of show and tell?

It appears that Facebook will now change to a more show than tell design, based on its mobile-friendly News Feed redesign. In fact, it will now bury the tell in loads of pictures. This shift will give the interface a personal newspaper-style format that has larger picture displays. This change to a photo-driven behavior is a response to the study that has shown that 50% of all posts are now pictures and that is why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to rapidly change the social media’s landscape.

It’s a change that makes sense bearing in mind that our brains are wired to like pictures better than words. A recent survey of 1,500 B2B and B2C companies Facebook Pages has shown that photo posts generate 53% more Likes and 104% more Comments than average posts. Also, photo posts got 84% more link clicks than text status updates or links with thumbnail pictures.

So what will happen if Facebook just becomes a bigger version of Tumblr or Pinterest and text posts become nonexistent?

HOW WILL THE SOCIAL WEB MONETIZE VISUAL CONTENT?

The internet has primarily been monetized by just text based advertisements, so much so that there is an entire industry developed around keyword optimization. Text or content is what drives SEO, Google and Facebook ads. In fact, words drive the economy of the web!

If visual content becomes the new means of marketing software, what will happen to the entire notion of indexing words to search for relevant content and advertisements?