We’ve all heard the phrase content is king! But as consumers, we are becoming increasingly more visual. I too find my buying decisions are becoming heavily influenced by visual content. Whether it’s due to the fact that I’m an active user on Instagram or that I’m bombarded by so much written content on a daily basis, I cannot quite tell. But it is evident that brands are also coming to this realization and they know that a genuine image rather than a stock photo can speak volumes when it comes to connecting with their consumer.
Enter Christina Hawatmeh, CEO and founder of, the social media equivalent to iStock. Hawatmeh identified a niche in the marketplace and went after it all good startups do. Scorpio is the first of its kind to find and license user-generated content in a way that ensures payment to the user and businesses get to use the images legally and in real-time.
According to Kissmetrics, content with relevant images gets 94 percent more engagement than content without relevant images. Authentic images are an essential part of PR storytelling and business strategy today. After all, a picture paints a thousand words.“People are desensitized to glossy ads and perfectly shot clips,” said Hawatmeh in a recent interview with Bizwomen. “Real pictures, not produced scenes, get 10 times more clicks on websites, and customers are more apt to connect with other people that are posting rather than being sold something.”
Just last week I attended the Digital Summit in Phoenix and during the conference I had the opportunity to hear from my industry peers on how to motivate our customers with storytelling and engage digital natives. I found this particularly interesting and I came to learn that digital natives don’t define celebrity in the same way as Generation X or even some millennials do.
Scorpio allows brands to build a storytelling engine by connecting them with the real storyteller i.e. the consumer. As social media becomes more embedded into the fabric of our daily lives it is essential that marketers engage with their consumers to tell their story. As I mentioned earlier, we are being bombarded more and more with content daily, and the objective is for it to be “liked”, shared, etc. We often forget that content elicits genuine emotion and Scorpio is an exciting new way for brands to make that connection.