10 Design Tips to Improve Social Media Marketing

When scrolling through social media newsfeeds, don’t we all take a quick peek into a new brand’s profile and tap the ‘follow’ button from time to time when their posts look aesthetically pleasing? Have you wondered if you follow the page for their content or just because their posts are visually appealing? As humans are very visual beings, businesses need to focus on the design of their social media as part of their marketing strategy. Social media is where you showcase your brand for target audience to form perceptions, so the designs play a vital role.

Here are 10 design tips to improve your social media marketing to attract more audience.

• Consistency and cohesion

Consistency and cohesion in social media marketing design is key to brand recognition. Consistently posting content with images that have the same visual theme helps the audience recognize your brand faster. Posting images that includes your brand logo and consistent color palette and fonts will allow you to build a strong brand identity on social media. It is also essential to keep the overall look and feel of different designs consistent and post cohesively across different platforms.

• More space for image, less text

Human brains are made for visual processing, we process images a thousand times faster than text. So instead of putting chunks of text into each social media post, try to use more space for the image and keep the main message short and sweet. Another reason to not overwhelm audience with texts is that humans have a short attention span, so marketing posts should be attention grabbing with the help of visuals before the audience lose their focus and miss the key message.

• Typography

When talking about typography, you may not pay much attention to it. But typography is an art, when selecting fonts that work seamlessly together, it can effectively portray your brand theme and evoke emotion to create a consistent brand identity. While readability is important, you should also look for fonts that can have big impact on how your design will be perceived by the audience.

• Less is more

Social media is usually used by people on small devices, so it is better to keep your design simple and easy for the audience to understand. Simple design gives your social media page a better and professional look overall. To keep the design simple, try using large, eye-catching elements while sticking to simple color palette and keep the typography to two fonts for optimal simple marketing image design.

• Be creative

Creativity is important for social media marketing. Since you shouldn’t be adding chunks of texts to your social media marketing, you should be creative with visuals, using them as a storytelling element. Visual storytelling comes in many forms, from illustrations, images, to GIFs and videos. Great visual storytelling has some core elements including captivating visuals that are well thought-out and have a clear purpose, capturing the brand’s essence.

• Variety of content

There is no strict rule on what type of content you should be posting about your business social media account. Don’t restrict posts to only a few templates and start posting more valuable and high-quality content to gain wider reach across platforms, adding variety. If you are only posting using one or two templates, consider infographics, industry tips, relevant inspirational quotes, your business milestones and more.

• Plan marketing posts

Your goal is to deliver high quality and relevant content to your social media followers in a consistent timeframe so you could establish brand credibility and identity. However, most of your time is already allocated to other aspects of your business, how would you have time to consistently post on social media? That is when you need to plan your social media marketing posts ahead. You should start creating a social media post template where you plan the content you will be posting ahead of time. This will help you improve your consistency in your post frequency.

• Color mirroring brand identity

Color does not only evoke emotions, but it also has a role in influencing how the audience perceives your brand. That is why the color red and yellow is popular among food brands. You can start incorporating colors into your social media marketing by using consistent colors for posts. If your business logo has red and white, your social media marketing should consistently use these two main colors in the design. For instance, you could be posting an infographic or a quote, the image background should be in white or red with contrasting text color to strengthen your brand identity.

• Adapt design to social platform

Image or video sizing and content guidelines vary across different social platforms. You should take this into account and adjust your post visuals and content to fit with each platform you are using because one size does not it all. If you are posting on Twitter, your content should be brief and concise due to character limits. And if you are posting on Instagram reels, you should pay more attention to the short clip content because people who watch reel do not pay much attention to the caption and description, unless it really piques their interest.

• Link back to your website

Links are important on social media posts because they can bring customers from social media to your business website and make an impulsive purchase. This is the same concept as call-to-action, when you include a link to your website, it encourages the audience to follow through your link and check out your website. More importantly, it also helps your website’s SEO because the search engine algorithms track and recognize the content when it’s linked to a website, moving your site up the search engine ranks.

A business’s online presence is important, and it is beneficial for you to understand the tips and tricks behind each successful social media marketing strategy to improve your own business’s performance. Businesses with exceptional online presence has a social media strategy that includes the elements mentioned in the 10 tips above. If you haven’t already implemented these, it’s the right time for you to start making a change and see your performance improving.

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