One huge part of your social media channels and content is the design element. Your social media channels must look good and stand out. Being someone who has a passion for both social media and design, this is something that I find very important, and there are reasons behind it.
Before we start with your content, we’ll talk about the look of your profile. When designing a header or profile picture for social media you must ask yourself two questions:
- Does it look professional?
- Is it relative to your brand?
These are the two key questions you should ask yourself after you finish designing. If I was to go on to a business’s twitter account the first thing I would look at is their twitter header, profile picture and bio. First impression is key. If it looks professional it will give a fantastic first impression, if it doesn’t, there will be reverse effects. It may just be a header on a social media channel but it is an example of the standards you set. If you take great care designing a header so your social media looks good, I would expect the same from your business. If it looked messy, I would be less interested as you can’t even make the effort to make your social media look good. Your social media should look good to reflect the high standards of your business.
Your social media is an example of your brand, many businesses have built themselves through social media and made the most of this. If you can have an eye catching profile picture, more people are likely to see your posts as the profile picture will make it stand out amongst others. However if my profile picture was neon pink and green then my actual branding was blue and white, my business would look unprofessional and make confusion as to what the actual identity of my brand is. One personal tip I would recommend is to try and keep your profile picture the same, then create your header around it. If you are tweeting frequently, as time goes by your audience are more likely to be able to see the profile picture on the left and then know it’s you straight away. This is something that has worked wonders for me personally.
A good way to start out on twitter is to have a professional looking account that matches your brand. If you aim to transfer users from twitter to your website, use the same/similar colours that you use on your website, on your twitter account. A fantastic tool you can use to get the colour exactly the same is the colour dropping tool. This is a google chrome add on or alternatively you can google ‘colour picker from image’ and it will bring up a list of websites that will tell you the colour code from an image. Hover over the selected part of the website you’d like to copy the colour for then paste the code into the tool you are using. It’s simple! I will leave a screenshot below of me using this in canva.
Now on to graphics:
As of 2016, content with relative images get 94% more views than content without images. 94%! This is why the use of images on social media is so key. One fantastic way to use images to your advantage is to post fun and interesting stats and facts about the sector your business is in. These posts get the most engagement and are more likely to be shared than any other kind of post. You can make these posts stand out with a graphic that grabs the eye. Make sure the colours of your graphic are relative to your business and look professional. I would also recommend using a consistent theme, where you simply replace the text for every new fact/tip. Or if your brand colours were green and blue, you could alternate the background colour between those two colours. It makes your social media look fun and engaging.
I would also recommend making sure your graphic is the recommended dimensions for the social networking website you’re uploading it to. We have a blog post on our website which will tell you all the correct sizes for your graphics, click here to view it. Website tools like Canva have templates available to save you creating a graphic in a certain size manually. Canva is a tool I would recommend, it allows you to create professional looking graphics with ease. It is a tool we use frequently for basic graphics.
One key thing to remember is that you don’t have to be a design pro to make your social media look professional and visually impressive. There are tools out there that will enable you to do this with ease. It may seem like a waste of time creating graphics to post out on your social media, but if you start doing it you will notice the results. Ten minutes of your day creating a graphic and posting it on social media can significantly boost your business online.