Design Tips and Best Practices for Social Media Graphics

IMPORTANCE OF VISUAL CONTENT

People have different preferences when it comes to how they process information, including the format and type they prefer, and how much information they want in the first place. Those preferences shift from topic to topic and platform to platform.

Visual content marketing makes your entire marketing strategy more effective. It lets you adapt to the changing demands of each topic or platform. More importantly, it resonates with your audience on an emotional level and moves them one step closer to conversion.

Types of Visual Content in Social Media Marketing

Images

When you split up a body of text with some compelling images, people are more inclined to finish reading what you’ve written (provided that the images are high quality and contextually relevant).

It’s preferable to use original images or ones taken by you, as this adds a much-desired personal touch to your campaign. High quality, attractive images are often expensive to purchase or time-consuming to create.

Videos

Videos are incredibly useful for presenting common problems and then showing the solutions that your product can offer. A great video serves as extra clout for your campaign by demonstrating that you’re prepared to go the extra mile for quality.

Data-driven visuals

To be a well-known leader in your industry, start creating data-driven content. Designed as charts or graphs, it can make it easier for your audience to comprehend your message than with text only.

Screenshots

For tech and SaaS companies, screenshots are an important way to illustrate how-to articles and punctuate blog posts with interesting visuals. Apple and Adobe, for example, both use screenshots in blog posts that feature new apps and games.

Quotes

Influencer marketing is a great strategy for extending your content marketing reach in a valuable way. Creating an image with the influencer and his or her quote, you create a memorable image.

Presentations

Gone are the days where presentations are restricted to just the boardroom; you can now share your presentation with the world , dramatically expanding the outreach of your business.

As your presentation is likely to include a lot of information, it’s crucial to remain consistent with things like fonts, borders, and colors.

Design Tips for Engaging Visual Content

Color

Color is an invaluable tool for creating contrast and balance. But it is important to be aware of how certain hues or pairings influence perception. Some colors such as those in the red and yellow families, can stimulate and energize, while others such as those in the blue spectrum can convey calm and trustworthiness.

Behind Good Design is Good Contrast

The right balance of light and dark can bring any social media graphic design layout to life.
Combine contrasting colors (search contrasting color palettes for combination ideas) to make your social media graphic design a scroll-stopper. The most eye-catching color combinations are colors that oppose each other on the color wheel.

Hierarchy

It’s quite likely that you’ll be working with multiple elements in your social media design. And chances are each of those elements will be important to your overall message. Hierarchy is a great social media design tip to make sure that you’re getting your most important message across first.

Typography

It’s obvious that typography is an art in itself. Selecting the perfect font to get aligned with the images can be tough, but when done right it can bring your graphics to life!

Visual Identity- Incorporate your branding into design

Make sure to include your logo in every image but keep in mind.  It’s great to include your logo in your pictures because you want people to associate it with your brand but making it half the size of the picture or more will come off as too cluttered.

Creativity

Create a variety when posting for your social media content. There is a plethora of different types of graphics that you can share on social media. 

If your graphics look and feel cohesive and related, then users can form a clearer understanding of your brand in their minds. If your graphics look and feel different every time, they will have no cumulative branding effect (except for ensuring that your users don’t know what to expect).