A Complete Guide to Creating Popping Graphic Design for Social Media
Table of Contents
Social media has grown over years to become one of the most revolutionary products of digital technology. What started as a platform to connect friends and family has evolved over the years to become a powerful interactive technology.
For a lot of forward-thinking businesses, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc., provide them with a great avenue to connect with customers, engage with them directly and promote their products or services.
It is an avenue to grow followers -who are either your existing customers, potential customers, or people who love or have an interest in your products or services or social media content.
As amazing and useful as social media is, it is also highly competitive and populated, there are millions of businesses within the same industry offering the same product or service to the same customers or audience, which means these businesses have to compete in an endless pool of content developed to gain the attention of the social media audience.
With this fierce competition, only the strongest with the best social media content survive, while others get lost in the process.
Interestingly, social media graphics allows businesses to create visually appealing and eye-catching memorable content that helps them stand out from competitors.
In this guide, we will walk you through the different types of social media designs, how to create them and how to use them to drive better business results.
Table of Contents
- What is social media design?
- Who needs social media graphics design?
- Why do you need graphics design in social media marketing?
- What to consider before creating your social media design?
- Checklist before creating social media designs
- Tips for designing a social media page
- Tips for Creating Eye-catching social media graphics design
- How can Alltime Design help you create stunning social media designs?
What is social media design?
Social media design refers to the overall planning, creation, and sharing of eye-catching and memorable visual content on social media platforms. In simple words, it is the combination of social media and graphic design to promote a business or product.
Social media is a highly visual platform from Facebook to Instagram to Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc., their feed is filled with images of various kinds, videos, Gifs, Infographics, and various kinds of social media graphics.
Several studies have shown time after time that including high-quality images and graphics on your social media page results in more engagement and interaction on those social media accounts.
According to a report by Brain Rules,
People retain 65% of information paired with relevant images even three days later compared to the information they hear, which they retain only 10% of it after three days.
Social media design is a business’s first step to building a social media presence, brand identity, and recognition and creating content that resonates with its target audience.
Who needs social media graphics design?
The world has morphed into a global village and social media has become an avenue to facilitate interaction and engagement between businesses and customers across the globe.
Hence, every forward-thinking business looking to connect with its global audience through social media marketing needs social media graphics design.
With reports that people are constantly scrolling through social media feeds for nothing less than 145 minutes a day, businesses use eye-catching visual content to connect with their audience and make a good impression of your business and ultimately keep your customers informed about what’s going on with your business.
Social media graphics design also helps these businesses generate brand awareness, and share products or services with them to increase sales. Check out the detailed guide about social media image size.
Why do you need graphics design in social media marketing?
Aside from the above reasons identified above, you need to create social media designs for the following reasons.
1. It helps you build a strong brand identity
It is not only enough to build a highly sought-after product or service and a functional website, you need to create a social media channel with highly efficient social media graphics.
With a social media platform, you can create social media graphics that can help you connect with your audience, introduce your brand values to them and help your potential customers and existing customers remember your brand.
2. It helps you stand out
Successful social media graphics contains eye-catching, compelling, and memorable visual content that can help you stand out from competitors and connect with your target audience and customers.
Following reports that humans’ attention span is getting shorter, with an average of 8 seconds. For businesses to gain the attention of their audience and get them to stop to check out their social media post, they need a creative social media graphic to achieve this.
3. It shows your professionalism
Social media graphics design helps you showcase your professional image and shows your target audience that your brand is credible and worth doing business with.
Social media posts with high-quality and engaging visual content give a business the much-needed recognition they need to grow and thrive.
4. It helps you connect with your target audience
As emphasized earlier, social media designs provide businesses with a great avenue to create content that helps them connect with their target audience.
Social media graphics cuts across various forms and types – infographics, product design, brand design, high-quality images, GIFs, and animations that can help you connect and gain the attention of your target audience for business benefits.
5. It can increase your sales
Social media graphics design helps you showcase your product or service in a way that resonates with your target audience and compel them to make a buying decision.
In simple terms, social media gets you closer to people who need your product or services and graphics design helps you visualize and present your offerings to make sales happen – which ultimately increases your sales.
Social Media Engagement?
What to consider before creating your social media design?
Just before you start creating social media designs, there are two important things you need to consider. These includes:
1. Develop your Brand Identity
Brand identity is the collection of visual elements such as color, fonts, designs, and logos that identify and portray your brand and set it apart from other similar brands (competitors).
Essentially, it is the image of your brand that resonates in the mind of your customers and target audience to get them to remember your brand and differentiate it from other similar brands.
So before you start to create graphics for your social media pages, you need to have a clear visual representation of your brand identity – brand colors, logo, fonts, and design – to differentiate your brand from others and give your target audience something to remember and hold on to.
2. Conduct Market research
The next step after your creating your brand identity is to conduct in-depth market research to understand your target market, and your audience – their needs, preference, pain points, interests -, market trends, and competitors.
Doing this enables you to understand what your target customers want, how they like the solution to be, and how they use it to enable you to develop a solid, data-driven social media strategy for your online identity.
We recommend that you ask yourself the following questions to help you find answers to the above questions.
- What are your target audience values?
- What are they looking for in a brand?
- What are they interested in or have passion for?
- What are they concerned about or are their pain points?
- What do they like to see on social media?
- What content do they interact with more on social media?
- What are your competitors doing on social media?
The answers gotten from the above questions will serve as a guide to creating your design strategy.
Checklist before creating social media designs
Now that you know what you need to do before creating your social media designs, you need a checklist to complete before starting with your social media designs. Here are some of the checklists to complete:
1. Plan your social media design strategy
Strategy is the most innovative and important step in every digital strategy. Hence the first step in your social media design is to plan and create your design strategy.
Your content is the message you have for your target audience and is a means to get your product or service to your customers, while social media design is an enhancer, that amplifies your content and gets it to attract the right audience.
Consider the following processes to plan your social media design strategy:
Evaluate the audience for your current social media channels
Customer research is critical to help you understand your customers, what they are passionate about, and their troubles.
When creating your social media page, you have to look into your audience to see what interests them, who is following and how they interact with your existing content to gain a better understanding of what they like and don’t like. Conduct interviews, surveys, and performance analytics to achieve this.
Choose the best platform to connect with your audience
Although all social media platforms offer businesses the avenue to showcase their product offering and connect with their customers, however not all social media platforms are your best choice to connect with your audience.
For you to reach out to your audience, you must find out where your audience is and use these platforms to share your content with them to grow your business.
Evaluate the type of content that performs best on those platforms
Understanding your audience, their interests, and pain points as well as the platform they use best will give you a better understanding of the type of content that interests them and they interact with more.
For instance, Images, videos, and textual graphical content work more on Facebook, while Instagram is a visual platform that works best with high-quality images and videos. TikTok and YouTube work best with videos. When you understand this, you can create engaging content that works for your audience and your chosen platform. Check out the guide about social media graphic design for your startup.
2. List, define and schedule your design assets
Now that you have a good understanding of your audience, the best platform, and the content that interests them, the next step is to start mapping your design plan with a series of briefs to actualize it.
Consider creating a content calendar to visualize and plan out your social media content for a specific period, usually a month and keep you organized through while creating your designs. Design experts recommend documenting the following processes to help you work better.
- Future content plans
- The goal of the content (what do you plan to achieve with the content)
- Intended audience
- Examples of competitors’ content
- Type of design (e.g Infographic, illustration, photograph, animated video, GIF, etc.)
- Social media Caption or copy (text that goes with the design)
- Design references.
3. Keep note of the content design size and dimensions for every social media platform
Various social media platforms have different content sizes and dimensions that work for each of them. Social media design sizes tend to change over time, so you should constantly update the content size to achieve this. Below is the content size and dimension for different social media channels for 2023
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Tips for designing a social media page
Now that you have your social media strategy in place, the next step is to set up your social media profile to start your social media design process.
Just like your website is your digital shop on the internet, your social media profile is your digital shop on social media – your homepage that houses your social media content and tells your prospects about you and what you do.
The visual elements, bio, and structure expresses your brand identity and get your audience to connect with you. Consider the following tips to create your social media page.
1. Profile picture design
Your profile picture otherwise known as your avatar, an extension of your logo is your social media identity. It serves as a signature for your social media posts and is one of the first things that your audience sees outside of your social media page.
Most organizations use their logo as their profile picture but redesign this to fit the social media site and use a bright background color to make this look good. Consider the examples below:
2. Cover Image Design
A cover image is a wide, rectangular banner that sits above your profile image. It is an expansion of your social media profile picture and essentially shows your audience more about your brand with brand-related texts, photos, and graphics. Check out some finest facebook cover image ideas.
3. Profile page layout design
As much as you want to spend time creating amazing graphic designs, you also want to pay attention to your page layout design by making good use of the spacing and alignment to make the page look visually enticing, well-organized, and outstanding. Create a page layout design to arrange your content in a visually appealing order.
Tips for Creating Eye-catching social media graphics design
If you are looking to create eye-catching social media graphic design for your page, below are some of the tips to create some.
1. Always use bold and bright color schemes
A recent trend taking over social media design is the use of bold and bright color schemes to drive audience attention and get them to stop and interact with the designs.
Many forward-thinking brands now use bold, bright and interesting color schemes to make social media pop, and ultimately stand out from the competitors.
2. Use icons to illustrate concepts
Social media is a highly visual platform that works well with visual content than texts. For these reasons, consider using icons that accurately reflect the theme of your content in your designs rather than explaining them with words.
People have a really low attention span and reading through can be counter-productive if you are looking to gain the attention of your target audeince with graphics. From the icons, your audience can already tell what your content is about. Explore the best Instagram highlight covers.
3. Create unique illustrations
Social media is a pool of different forms of high-quality designs constantly moving through the feeds of millions of social media users.
In order for your to actually standout and gain the attention of your customers on the platform, you have to create a unique illustration of your content that not only captures the attention of your audience but also gets to interact with you, depending on what you are promoting could be to click on a link to buy or share them with their followers.
4. Always visualize data with charts and infographics
Infographics have grown to become one of the most used and versatile types of social media graphics that a lot of businesses are using to drive audience engagement on social media platforms.
To help your audience understand and connect with your data-related content better, consider visualizing them in charts and infographics to make them more understandable and easy to remember.
5. Make text the focus of your social media graphics design
As much as you don’t want to have too many texts in your social media design, you should not totally eliminate texts from your designs as texts have a way of conveying your message in a way that your audience can connect.
For this reason, make your social media design texts visible enough for your audience to read across different devices without squinting their eyes. Try to also make it too big, and find a balance in the size to achieve your goals.
6. Consider using pre-made social media templates to get started
Social media can be very overwhelming if you are just starting out, especially if you don’t have a graphics design background. To help you deal with this, consider finding pre-made social media templates to guide your first designs on social media.
7. Create custom Gifs
Gifs are interactive animated content that is mostly used and shared on social media to visually engage their audiences and create shared experiences. Consider creating GIFs to engage your customers and increase their interaction with your brand.
8. Incorporate your branding into your social media design
Your branding is your brand identity. Consider adding your brand logo, colors, and fonts consistently across your social media pages.
How can All Time Design help you create stunning social media designs?
All Time design offers affordable and high-quality graphic design services by a team of professional graphic designers for B2B and B2C businesses.
With a robust and intuitive platform, Alltime design enables access to incredibly fast and professionally vetted creative designs – brochures, presentation designs, infographics, social media ads, and many others – to empower your social media marketing efforts.
All Time design offers a wide range of some of the best design supports and features such as unlimited designs and requests, access to professional designers, ownership of your design files, 21-day risk-free trial, dedicated support, instant access to a super intuitive platform, 12 hours turnaround, dedicated Account Manager, designer, and creative director and real-time chat with your designer and many other.
While all these features are available for you to use, your subscription plan will determine which of the features you get access to.
Overall, All Time design is a powerful design platform you should be using for your creative projects.
