Image source: Pexels
If your social media feeds look dull and indistinguishable from other brands and users, your audiences will ignore your content.
You’re not likely to engage your target audience effectively, potentially ruining your chances of boosting brand awareness and recognition and developing a solid social media presence.
Fortunately, there are strategic ways to design your social media content to help capture your audience’s attention at first glance and make them stick.
While the importance of graphic design in social media extends to your social messaging apps and other aspects, we’ll focus on the five content design tips below.
1. Incorporate various design types in your content
Run-of-the-mill content or using the same type of post can get quickly boring for your audience. It won’t help your efforts to connect with followers better, much less drive engagement.
The solution? Learn how to write amazing content that your social media audience can’t help but click, like, and share by throwing in various content designs and types.
You can cover multiple topics, including customer highlights, behind-the-scenes video clips, and other promotional materials.
Find and create opportunities to employ several design styles to keep your social feeds interesting and engaging.
For instance, flat design colors and characters can work best in swipeable or vertical infographics that tell a story or convey information.
While creating various content designs can require time and resources, streamline your workflows using modern social media marketing solutions.
Vista Social makes it easy to plan, create, sort, curate, and schedule your social media posts to auto-publish on your set dates and times.
Image source: vistasocial.com.
You can connect your profiles and manage your social media content and activities from one place.
Vista Social also offers other advanced features, including a listening functionality, reviews management, and reliable tools for Instagram marketing (among others).
Spice up your social media feeds by using multiple content designs and types that can best support your audience engagement initiatives and grow your brand’s presence.
2. Make your content design valuable for audiences
Your social media content should help facilitate your efforts to promote your brand and other marketing efforts, but it also needs to provide value to your audiences.
After all, your audiences follow you for a reason, whether to get information, inspiration, or entertainment.
Give your followers what they came for or they’ll unfollow or ignore you, and you’ll lose boatloads of engagement opportunities.
Make your social media content design more than visually appealing—it should also be valuable and compelling.
For instance, ensure your visual content for product promotions include highly visible Calls-to-Action, such as using contrasting colors for your “Buy SEO Articles” CTA button.
Also, use clear, easy-to-read formats and fonts for your captions and core message.
Estée Lauder’s Instagram post highlighting the brand’s gel pencil features with bold, black font on a white background is a classic example.
Image source: instagram.com.
The post is designed to draw the viewer’s eyes to the product’s distinguishing features.
Design your content to capture your audiences’ attention while providing them value.
You can even ask your followers the kind of social media content they want to see from your brand.
Leverage your audiences’ comments and incorporate data you collected and analyzed using robust user feedback software. It can help you tailor and design your content to address your audiences’ preferences and pain points.
3. Create templates and themed content
While the gold standard is to produce unique and interesting content every time you post on social media, it’s not always necessary and practical time and resource-wise.
Save precious work hours and energy while creating stunning, compelling visual content by designing templates for several of your posts. Doing so can help you produce more content efficiently.
Using templates also helps you ensure visual cohesion across your content easily.
Templates can be useful for recurring image designs, such as YouTube video thumbnails.
When using templates, remember to put a new spin on each new content to keep your creatives and posts fresh and dynamic to your audiences.
Use handy ecommerce software and graphic design platforms for online sellers and marketers.
For example, Canva offers a library of highly customizable templates, from Facebook cover photos to YouTube thumbnails.
Image source: canva.com.
Use Canva’s suite of easy-to-use graphic design and editing tools to customize your templates how you want.
You won’t need to create your social media content from scratch while getting some guidance and inspiration on the best ways to design your posts.
Templates allow you to skip some of your design process’s brainstorming, sketching, and trial-and-error strategy while producing high-quality, eye-catching content.
You can also create your custom templates to reuse and customize when necessary.
4. Balance content uniqueness and consistency
Your content should be unique and compelling enough to draw attention and engagement and help establish your brand’s presence.
However, it should also contribute to your overall social media design.
One way of keeping your social media content unique and consistent with your entire social feed is to vary your content pieces and creatives while ensuring they align with your brand guidelines’ core principles.
For instance, you can plan your content chronologically, so it connects to your other posts to form one cohesive layout.
The approach can work especially well on Instagram since the platform displays your content in three-column square grids on your profile’s page, as shown below on Material Kitchen’s IG page.
Image source: instagram.com.
Keep your posts original but ensure consistency with your social media page’s aesthetics.
It can make your social media pages visually pleasing while helping audiences remember and recognize your brand.
5. Track and tweak your design based on data
It’s crucial to know which content designs work and don’t work for your audience and strategies. It can help you engage your audience effectively and amplify your brand’s social presence.
Track and measure your social media content performance based on likes, shares, the traffic it drives to your website, and other crucial metrics.
Implementing a content tracking strategy can help you spot gaps, allowing you to adjust your social media content’s design accordingly.
Consider the following tips.
- Create benchmarks based on your best (and worst) performing content and posts. It can give you a good sense of which metrics to monitor and evaluate effectively to determine success or failure.
- Run A/B tests to determine the best content design variants that get the best responses from your audiences.
- Use social media marketing analytics tools to get insights into views, impressions, and watch times (for videos).
The more you understand your content performance, the better you can tweak your messaging and designs to improve your results.
Design winning social media content
Developing stand-out, high-quality, compelling, and on-brand content isn’t exactly a walk in the park, but the time and effort you put into producing one can be more than worth it.
Jumpstart your efforts to take your social media content designs to the next level for optimum engagement and a solid social media presence.
