Social media is unquestionably a huge force in the marketing world today – and it’s only getting bigger. In 2018, more than 3.2 billion people were on social networks all over the world. You can’t afford to ignore the potential of these communication tools. But you also need to get the details right in order for your social media strategy to be successful. By carefully studying the best practices of social media design and placement, you can make your social channels stand out from the crowd and entice your potential customers.
Social Media Design Must-Haves
Social media is a critical part of your overall digital marketing strategy. It can seem overwhelming to manage by yourself, but you can always hire help. Or use the principles of good graphic design to create your own content. There are free tools out there to help you create the images you need. But if you’re creating your own content, remember to make sure your content is high quality. As devices and laptop screen have gotten higher-resolution, any poor-quality images will only hurt your brand.
Principles of Social Media Design
Good social media marketing starts with the basics of social media design. You want your social media images to be more than just nice-looking. An image can capture and convey a whole range of emotions, values, and messages. And in the visually-focused world of social media, these images might be your only chance to convey those messages to your audience. With a good basis in design principles, your images can speak for your brand.
Color
Color is the strongest way to set a mood, whether it’s in your webpage design or your Instagram feed. Blue evokes trust, green is relaxing, red brings urgency and energy, and black is powerful. Purple is soothing, yellow is youthful, orange is aggressive, and pink is romantic. What feeling are you trying to evoke from your audience? If you run a company that helps other businesses exceed their sales goals, orange can convey that sense of aggression. On the other hand, if you’re selling pillows that help your customers drift off to sleep, some purples and greens will help your images.
Balance and Lines
Your images can say a lot about what you value. Straight lines convey a sense of order, while curving lines suggest movement. Balance can be symmetrical, which is best for drawings, blog graphics, and photos with its sense of calm harmony. Or it can be asymmetrical, which brings a sense of dramatic tension to the image.
Typography
While social media images can be purely visual, sometimes it’s most impactful to include words as well. You want to choose the right font for your brand – are you more traditional or casual? And for any online content, use a sans-serif font to make your text more readable. Don’t use more than three typefaces in your content or it will start to look too busy.
Contrast
Adding contrast helps the most important part of your images stand out from the rest. If you’re trying to highlight your product in an image, make sure it’s in a contrasting color or shade. Adding shapes around text or pieces of an image is another way to create contrast.
Repetition
This element is last, but it’s the most important piece to having a consistent social media presence. Consistently using the same fonts, colors, and elements in your images on your social media networks helps your audience form a stronger awareness of your brand. That’s because they can see an image of yours that has the same feel as the rest of your feed and know it’s your brand without even looking at who is posting. All your design elements in your social media networks – from your brand profile image to your logo – should be consistent in the look they have and the feelings they evoke.
Social Media Placement
Where you place your social media images is also an important consideration. Since almost all social networks are highly visually focused, you want your well-designed images to be prominent in everything you post. This is built into platforms like Instagram or Pinterest where the main focus is images. But it’s also important not to overlook placing images in other social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Even in your YouTube channel, you should have cover images with that consistent look and feel for all your videos.
You can also include some images you’ve created for social media into blog posts if they work for the topic. Be sure to add social share buttons so your audience can easily share your tips to Pinterest or Twitter. If your website has the capability to add a feed of your social media content, you can place that in a part of your website where it adds value to that content. This should be an essential element of your web design process to allow for social sharing.
Bring in the Experts
Creating all your own social media images and placing them perfectly requires a lot of time invested. And many business owners like you just don’t have that time to spare. Instead of skipping the benefits of social networks, why not ask the experts for help? At ContentFirst.Marketing, we help businesses just like yours master the social space and develop a thoughtful, data-driven digital marketing plan. Schedule your free business review today to find out more.
