Social Media Graphics – Design Tips for your Business

Social media graphics are nothing new in the modern marketing world but they are still something that many businesses do not fully execute to their full potential. Interestingly, 90% of information is processed through visual elements. Visual content increases your chances to successfully engage with your audience, start a conversation and build relationships. Based on these facts, marketers recognise the importance of implementing visual cues in their marketing strategies, especially on their social media platforms.

This blog will explain how visuals can improve your social media marketing strategy and provide you with useful design tips for your business.

Visual Content in Social Media Marketing Strategy

Why businesses should use visual content in their social media marketing (SMM)? Unfortunately, these days the information or text in your post is simply not enough for people to stop scrolling and notice your message. Your brand content will gain more attention if it’s accompanied by visual elements, which will help emphasise your message.

It is important to keep in mind the strategic marketing goals for the different social channels. In addition, SMM can work for different kind of purposes depending on the business sector. For example, running a Business to Consumer (B2C) business, the company can easily get customers through social media since their leads reach the final stage of the sales funnel without even leaving the network. On the other hand, Business to Business (B2B) businesses are focused on the direct potential leads to their website. In other words, creating social media graphics with visual materials should be based not only on the overall marketing strategy but also on the business model of the company.

Social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter require visual content that supports the official tone of voice, whereas platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat have a more friendly approach in terms of the usage of visual materials.

Tips for Engaging Visual Graphics

We have compiled a list of useful design tips that can help your business’s social media strategy.

First of all, there are different types of visual content on social media such as unique graphics that help your business stand out this can be in the form of blogs, promoting a guide or even referencing a quote. Videos which can come in any form of content that relates to your brand, photos that show behind the scenes, animated content is another great way to grab attention and more.

Goal Oriented

As a marketer, you should first ask yourself what is your goal and how can social media help you achieve that goal. Do you want to promote your products and services or you would rather focus more on educating people through marketing tips and blogs?  

Try theme days, where all of your business posts revolve around a general topic. For example, we have Maven Mondays videos, where we give useful marketing tips and try to help businesses grow.

Setting up a theme for every week of the month will help businesses create new visual content more easily and improve their scheduling in advance.

Design Templates

Before you start creating your social media graphics, try setting up several templates for future use. Consider your themes/goals and the different sizes for the various social media channels. You could use creative tools such as Crello and Canva to help you build beautiful design templates. Make sure your designs are consistent across all channels so you don’t move away from your branding.

Creating visual social media graphics in batches will save you time and effort, in this way your audience will know where the post comes from and what kind of message to expect.

Branding

When creating your social media graphics it is important to remember to identify your company with branding. Visuals are shared all over social media networks all the time. In most cases, it is better to mention your company’s name rather than just adding a logo unless your company is well-known. Branding helps your audience to easily find more information about your business, but it shouldn’t shift away from the attention of the brand message.

Visual Hierarchy

The primary task is to make sure that your social graphics are visual and eye-catching since not many users go on a business’s page to check recent posts. Most followers scroll on their feed to look through new updates so that means that you have less than a second to make a user engage with your message.

Visuals attract attention but sometimes it can be hard to make the content stand out, in this case, don’t be afraid to play with opacity and hues to exaggerate your message. Try to incorporate new tints of your custom colour palette that reflect your brand personality to surprise your followers and boost your social media engagement.

Call to action

Even if social media graphics catch your audience attention, that simply is not enough. Marketers want to stimulate action by increasing sharing, commenting and liking. Make sure that you don’t forget to add elements to illustrate call-to-action to convert your target audience into leads.

Visual content plays an important role in any social media marketing plan. Businesses should take into consideration their marketing goals and the company’s tone when creating social media graphics.

Social media will only keep evolving and with that, your strategy should consider other types of visuals such as GIFs or videos. At the same time try not to overdo the design and keep a good balance between simplicity and informativeness since time is limited.

Need help with your Social Media Strategy?

Download our social media strategy guide to help you create stunning visual graphics.