Source: Levanier, J (n.d.). from https://99designs.com/blog/marketing-advertising/social-media-design/
Fifteen years ago, you may have gotten away with calling social media a fad. But these days, a social media presence is as essential as a telephone number—and a strategic approach to social media design is how you make sure your followers answer the call.
For businesses, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest are excellent spaces to engage directly with the real people who support you. It’s where you create connections with content that entertains your followers while fostering brand awareness.
As useful as social media is, it is also highly competitive. Once you publish content, it joins an endless stream of content, where it will compete not only with the content produced by other brands, but also with the platform’s ranking algorithm. Only the strong survive in social media, but the good news is that standout social media graphics are the best tools in your arsenal to create memorable, engaging content.
This ultimate guide to social media design will walk you through the different kinds of social media graphics, how to use them and, most importantly, how to make them matter.
The first step in social media design is to create your strategy (or review your existing one). Design should act as an enhancement to your content, facilitating the messages you want to get across, so it’s essential to first create a solid messaging strategy in order to perform well.
Now that you have a better idea of your audience and the channels you’ll be using, you can start mapping out a design pipeline with a series of briefs. This and a content calendar will help keep you organized through the design process. Make sure to document the following:
A reference of social media content sizes and dimensions is a must-have for any designer. This allows you to size your canvases quickly and to adapt designs across different platforms. Social media sizes tend to change now and again, so be sure to update this list regularly. As of June 2020, here are the sizes and dimensions for common social media platforms:
Now that you have a strategy, you’re ready to set up your social media profiles for success. Your profile is the homepage to your social media account. It is where users will go when they search your name or are otherwise directed via a link. It is also where the “Follow” button will live—a well-executed profile design can make the difference in whether or not they click it.
The goal of your profile page is to tell prospective followers who you are. While your bio should lay this out in a few concise statements, the design of your profile will do so visually, using color, shape, and imagery to express your brand identity.
To maintain consistency, it’s important to avoid using graphics that are not in line with your brand guidelines. Graphics should be meaningful and should represent your brand identity. When choosing images for your profile page, ask yourself what message each graphic is conveying and ensure that the message is consistent across all platforms.
To help you get the most out of your profile design, we’ll go through the common components of a social media profile and provide tips on leveraging each for branding.
Your profile picture (or avatar) is your online identity, along with your handle. It is the part of your profile that will be seen outside your profile page, acting as a signature for your posts. This is why profile pictures are generally small, to give more attention to your posts. With that in mind, focus your avatar on simplicity.
Some brands can get away with using their entire logo if it’s legible at a tiny size. Many brands will instead opt for an abbreviated version (either the first letter in the brand name or the logomark by itself). Backing this version of the logo with a bold color or pattern can help it stand out. Also, remember that although dimensions are given in a square orientation, most platforms use circular avatars.
The bright background logomark can be a great profile picture option. Via Airbnb.
Some brands can get away with displaying their full logo in the avatar if it remains clear and legible at that size. Via LEGO.
A patterned background can make the logo pop. Via Birchbox.
Although not all social media platforms include cover images, it is common enough that your design strategy should account for one. The cover image is the wide, rectangular banner that sits at the top of your profile page. It shares an intrinsic relationship with the profile picture—they are commonly positioned together. In some ways, you can think of your cover image as the expansion of your profile picture, the space in which you can fit more text, photos and graphics.
Many cover image designs go as far as to have the graphics of each literally interact with the avatar, as in the line of color that is sustained from cover image to avatar in the No Co Facebook design. Just be careful with this approach—while clever, it can be a lot of effort for something that is essentially a gimmick and will break when your profile layout is rearranged for smaller screen sizes.
While the cover image on your social media page gives you more space to work with than your profile picture, it’s important not to overdo it with a busy or cluttered design. Your cover image is not only meant to make a visual impact, but it’s also an advertisement for your brand. It’s the perfect space to showcase what sets your brand apart and display additional contact information, such as your website address, phone number or other social media handles.
In summary, your message should be clear and concise, and having too much visual content can distract from that message. It’s best to choose simple and minimalist imagery that reflects your brand’s values. For instance, the Kathryn Mueller YouTube channel uses bright and friendly pastel pinks, circular shapes, and a photo of the trainer in workout clothes to convey that it is a fitness brand owned and operated by a woman, which is focused on promoting wellness and balance.
Although the profile page layout is generally dictated by the social media platform and the day-to-day content you publish, you still have some control over how your page is presented. This part of the design process does not involve creating social media graphics, but it does involve the use of spacing and alignment to make your content accessible for users.
YouTube is an example of a platform that gives you more tools to customize your profile page. One convention is to pin a channel trailer to the top (explaining what your content is about), following that with a feed of recent uploads and blocks of curated video playlists. Similarly, Pinterest is built on the ability to organize content through boards (and sub-boards).
Whatever the platform, take the time to arrange your page so that the most important content is up top and that featured images (if applicable) convey the nature of grouped content.
Even with platforms like Instagram and Facebook that display your recent posts in chronological order, with no options for customized profile display, you can still plan for how your day-to-day content will display on your page (more on that later).
The great thing about social media is the amount of versatility that exists between platforms. Each social media app has its unique approach to design and how it distributes content. So, while most platforms share common design categories, such as avatars and cover images, each platform might have extra profile designs you’ll need to account for.
For example, your social media branding for Twitch will include an offline image (a static graphic shown on the video screen when you are not currently live) and screen overlay images (branded graphics overplayed on the screen when you are live). On YouTube, you will need to plan for a channel trailer, branded video thumbnails and lower thirds. If you plan to run ads on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, ensure they seamlessly fit the rest of your branding.
Make sure to spend some time testing out the profile pages and reviewing those of your competitors on the specific platforms you plan to use ahead of time, and take advantage of these extra branding opportunities.
Social media is all about content—it’s where you share media and engage with your followers daily. While giving your profile page design plenty of attention is worthwhile, all of that effort will be wasted if your content designs fail to impress.
The nature and design of content will vary depending on who your brand is, what your business does and your goals are, but the following are general guidelines to help you create social media graphics to earn you followers—and keep them.
You would think that tailoring the content to your audience would be a no-brainer. But given that social media is designed for publishing your words and pictures, it can be tempting to make it about you: consider the criticisms around selfies and projecting a curated life. Your audience chose to follow you for a reason. Whether it’s for information, entertainment or inspiration, your job is to give the people what they came for. Content design, likewise, must be more than visually appealing—it has to be useful.
Here’s an example: You know that most people follow your brand to be notified about sales and promotions. You decide to make a social media event out of a promotional campaign with a special logo, content, and ad designs, as Del Marva does with their blood drive. In their case, the bright orange and cascading pineapple pattern make it clear that this is a celebratory event (while also helping the content to stand out in the feed). But Del Marva also uses clear, bold typography supported by bright banners that contrast the background to highlight pertinent information such as the date and how to participate. This is a post that is designed not only to be eye-catching but also to compel a viewer to save it or share it with a friend.
Content variety has to start with your strategy. Your posts should cover various topics (such as behind-the-scenes business content, customer highlights, promotional materials, etc.), but you should also look for and create opportunities to accommodate different design styles to keep your feed dynamic and engaging.
It helps to know what different design styles excel at. Flat design characters and colors are useful for infographics (the vertical or swipeable variety) that convey information or tell a story. Hand-lettered typography can be great for inspirational words that people might be compelled to share or for questions that people might be compelled to comment on. Photography is a chance to showcase real people and real products—you want photos to look professional, but resist the urge to over-filter and lose that authenticity.
One of the best ways to create variety is to involve your followers in your social media strategy. Consider crowdsourcing methods, like hashtag contests or social media takeovers. This might result in visually inconsistent content, but it will be consistent with your brand because it stems from your customers, whom your brand ultimately serves.
Even as you vary your design content, remember that a chronological feed of your recent posts will appear on your profile page for many platforms. As mentioned in the previous section, your profile page needs to be visually consistent to function effectively for branding purposes, and your posts shouldn’t detract from that consistency.
It all comes down to a balancing act: your content must be individual, with its own goals and targeted segments of your audience, but it must also contribute to the collective whole of your social media design. The key is branding—design varied content but keep each piece in line with the core principles of your brand guidelines.
Some brands go as far as to plan their chronological content in a way that it connects to form a cohesive page layout. This works especially well with Instagram which reliably arranges content in three-column square grid on the profile page. By publishing designs with similar styles every three posts, you can set up columns that create a cohesive aesthetic when people are viewing your profile page.
On the downside, this method can restrict the types of content you are able to post, lest you break your overall page design. For the most part, you have more design options and opportunities for expanding your content by letting your feed be organic but visually on-brand.
Although it might seem ideal to have all of your social media content be surprising and original, often this is not practical or even necessary. Designing templates for some of your posts not only allows you to create content in a speedy and scalable way, it also establishes easy visual cohesion.
This convention can be especially helpful for recurring design images like YouTube’s video thumbnails. On the one hand, you want the thumbnails to be unexpected and to make viewers want to click on them. But because the meat of the content is the actual video, it doesn’t make sense to spend time and energy crafting unique thumbnails from scratch every time.
’Template’ can sometimes be a dirty word in design, synonymous with boring and generic. Think of these instead as design roadmaps that allow you to skip some of the brainstorming, sketching and trial-and-error of the design process. And you can still vary the templates with each post by changing up the specific imagery or color. At the end of the day, there are times when templates are important for speeding up your design pipeline so that you can give more important content the attention it deserves.
Social media moves fast. The minute you post something, you are sending it into a stream to sink or swim with other content posted every other minute. The good news is that the speed with which social media moves gives you fast results. Most content has a lifespan of a few hours to a day or so at most (in which you get the bulk of your impressions, likes and comments). With this in mind, you can test, quickly know which designs work and don’t work and adjust your design strategy accordingly.
From a numbers standpoint, what defines a successful post depends on your particular following. It is helpful to create benchmarks based on your best and worst-performing content to have a sense of metrics that indicate success or failure within the context of your other content. Remember that there can also be other factors in poor content performance—such as the time of posting, the ever-inscrutable algorithm, real-world events that might have your followers’ attention elsewhere, or plain bad luck.
A/B testing is one useful tool that can help you rule out flukes or decide which design variants are the best option. In addition to the platform-specific analytics (that usually reveal things like impressions, views, and watch time in the case of video), tools like UTM codes added to your CTA links will let you know which specific posts earned traffic.
Social media is a highly competitive arena, and it takes great planning and hard work to succeed, both on the content and the design front. But the results are worth striving for. Not only is social media excellent for attracting leads, converting customers, and all-around brand awareness, but it’s also where you get to have real interactions with people. At the end of the day, it’s called social media because it’s supposed to be fun.
The best way to ensure your social media presence is primed to spark a conversation is to work with an expert designer. Good design can convince followers to stop scrolling and pay attention to what you have to say. It can make your messages useful and easy to digest. It can demonstrate your professionalism and commitment to quality. If you want the kind of social media graphics that get your followers talking, an expert designer is only a click away.
Source: Levanier, J (n.d.). from https://99designs.com/blog/marketing-advertising/social-media-design/