Social media has grown over the years to become a gold mine for every forward-thinking business. With the persistent growth rate of digital innovation in almost every sector of the world economies, many businesses have begun exploring social media for more brand-focused and business growth purposes.
Originally used as a medium to connect and interact with family and friends over the internet, social media has transformed into a full-scale business platform that many businesses, professionals, and consumers leverage to build their awareness, improve their interaction and engagement with customers, get easy access to their favorite brand, promote/advertise their products or services or ultimately, increase sales of their products or services.
The focus on social media for business promotion has led to fierce competition among businesses, allowing only the strongest to dominate and achieve their goals with the platforms. The only way therefore for businesses to thrive on social media is by creating and using strong, eye-catching, and high-quality graphic designs.
Following a report that *[90% of information](https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33423/19-Reasons-You-Should-Include-Visual-Content-in-Your-Marketing-Data.aspx) transmitted to our brains is visual* and **subsequent ones, that we naturally process, interact with, and retain visual information much faster than texts, creating strong visuals that your customers can relate to is a proven way to nail your social media marketing game.
According to a recent survey by Venngage on the use of visual content in marketing strategy, they discovered that:
49% of content marketers use visual content on Facebook, 47% on Instagram, 42% on LinkedIn, 33% on Twitter, and 62% on blogs and landing pages.
If you wish to thrive, increase your customer engagement and get outstanding results from your social media activities, you need to incorporate strong visuals in your designs. This guide will take you through the rudiments of using graphic designs to boost social media activities and best practices for creating graphics designs on social media.
Creating graphics design for social media is a strategic process that requires a lot of planning and strict adherence to some guidelines to achieve your desired results. Below are some of the important factors to consider before creating graphic designs for your social media platforms.
Image: Wordstream
Strategy is the hallmark of every marketing or brand promotion activity. It guides, coordinates, and set the rule and pace at which a business promote its products or services on social media. Graphic design is a social media performance booster, a substantial amount of your social media marketing activities lies in the content that you will be sharing. Hence, you have to create a well-structured plan for the content that you will be posting, the frequency of posts, and how you can use graphic design to enhance your content engagement and performance.
Image: Wordstream
Your social media audience is extremely important to the success of your social media interaction. No business can survive without customers and for this reason, you have to conduct in-depth research on the kind of audience you have on social media - your active and passive followers, those that regularly engage with your content (by either liking, commenting, or sharing your content) and those that your products or services serve. From this research, you can easily find out more information about your followers, and their content preferences to develop better strategies on how you can improve your social media content to satisfy them. From this, you also be able to gain better insights into the kinds of graphic design that your audience like more and create more of them to boost your social media performance.
Image: WordStream
Now that you know the kinds of audience/followers that are following you on social media and are interacting with you on the platform, and the type of content that you have to create to engage and connect with them. Social media is a great platform to reach your audience but not all social media platforms are perfect for your business and audience. Hence depending on all the information you have gathered over time, you can choose the best-performing platform that supports the kind of content that your audience prefers. For example, if your customers are corporate professionals who enjoy brand storytelling content, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for you to work with.
After identifying your audience and best social media platforms as well as your best performing content, the next stage is to develop effective strategies on how you will create more of such content and how you can continuously improve them to achieve your business goals and objectives. Aside from reviewing and enhancing your content, you must also research your competitor's content to gain a better understanding of the type of content that you should create to increase your content engagement.
Image: Social Champ
The final step to consider before starting your social media design is to list and complete all your design requirements - map out a design pipeline, briefs, design assets, design sizes, and dimensions for every social media platform as well as robust content calendar. Listing the above design assets will help you stay prepared and organized through the design process to the sharing stage. Concerning the content calendar, ensure you include all the necessary information like the content goal, audience, competitor content analysis, type of design, caption, and design samples to enhance the process.
Creating visually appealing social media graphics for your brand is an effective way to build your brand awareness, connect with your customers and promote your products or services to achieve sales. As easy as it sounds, you need to follow some set guidelines to efficiently use graphic design to improve your social media engagement and growth. They include:
Image: Hootsuite
The common rule for successful social media design is to adhere to the right sizes for all social media platforms. From Facebook to Instagram, Pinterest pins, Snapchat, Tiktok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube Banner, every social media platform has its size requirements. To create effective social media designs that help you gain the attention of your customers, ensure that you create designs that fit these requirements so they can turn out the right way.
Your social media outlook has to be visually appealing and eye-catching to gain the attention of your desired audience. The underlying principle of every successful social media design is the use of relevant designs that help you explain concepts better and get your customer to connect to the idea of the subject topics
Another main rule to consider when creating graphics design is to always showcase your branding and always let it show in all your designs. Graphics design is an enhancer for your social media campaigns, you can use it to visualize your ideas or concepts and engage your social media audience. Graphics design is also a powerful avenue to promote your brand and Increase your brand awareness and recognition. To achieve this, always include your brand logo in all your designs and consistently use your brand color scheme, font, and styles to enable more of your customers to recognize your brand and interact better with you on social media.
Aside from using designs to improve your branding on social media, you must also ensure that your social media designs are consistent so your audience has something to look out for and can always look forward to your designs on social media. To determine this, look out for the following in your social media campaigns:
From the above questions, you can determine the designs that work best to promote your products or service and engages your audience. Once you identify all these, you can create a design style that you can create consistently to increase your audience engagement.
Owing to the popular saying that “less is more,” you must ensure that your social media designs are very simple, beautiful, and relatable - designs that your audience can connect with and is very easy to understand. As much as you want to create eye-catching designs that attract your audience’s attention and help them engage with you better, you must also ensure the design passes the message that it's meant to. Your social media aesthetics has to be of the best quality, but must also help you achieve your business goals and objectives. Always keep this in mind when creating your social media designs.
Social media is used by different people from various countries in the world. Even when you have identified your target audience and have created content/design that fits their preference, you must also consider other social media users outside of your identified target audience. For this reason, you must ensure that you use subtitles, alt-text, colors, and styles that can be accessed by everyone regardless of where and when they view the designs.
Creating attractive and compelling designs for your social media pages is a lot of work and it can be very tasking if you have to create designs from scratch every time you have to post. A good way to manage this is by creating social media templates that fit your audience's preferences and help you build your content consistency across all your social media pages. With the templates, you can always post at the right time without stress.
The overarching goal of creating visually appealing and compelling designs is not only to give your audience something to enjoy but also to leverage it to promote your products or services and ultimately increase sales. Considering the benefits of graphics design for your business, you must ensure that the design is shareable and useful to reach new users and help you improve your brand awareness. This helps you gain new prospects or followers without any extra cost on your end.
Image: Canva
As emphasized in the earliest paragraphs, designs in social media are used to engage your customers and showcase your brand proficiency. To make the best out of this, you must include all the important and impressive statistics about your company's success, reports, and achievements in your social media designs. Consider visualizing these important data or information on infographics, graphs, and charts to make it more visually appealing and understandable.
Graphics design combines various visual and graphical elements to make the designs more memorable and attractive. Texts and Icons are the two most important elements that you must include in your design to arouse the interests of your audience and make the design more memorable to help you achieve all your business goals. Texts and icons also give your audience an idea about the message you are conveying in your designs at first glance.
Social media is highly competitive and is an effective platform to promote your business and increase your brand awareness. Creative designs are essential to help you thrive and stand out from your competitors on social media. You must ensure your designs speak to your brand and helps you connect with your audience.
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