The social media pictures you post are like a currency that can be traded for likes, shares, and overall popularity. Valuable and appropriately curated content gives people a reason to follow and pay attention to your profile, so the importance of learning how to create it cannot be overstated. Those that stay for longer and engage with your posts are also more likely to make a purchase and become returning customers eventually.
Whether you’re running a digital marketing agency in Glasgow, trying to build your personal brand, or selling a certain product or service, having a great-looking social media page can be a true game-changer. Social media are saturated with bright colors and animated images, but it’s not enough to follow someone else’s lead or style – you also need to create consistent and compelling branding.
Developing a social media marketing strategy using photos requires time and effort, but once it reflects your brand’s strengths and mission, you’ll soon be able to see the fruits of your work.
Read on to learn more!
Learn About Basic Design Rules
Starting out with the very basics might seem quite daunting at first. Nevertheless, no matter how confident you are in your design skills, refreshing your memory might work wonders. You don’t need a graphic design degree to post on social media, but you can take advantage of the tips and tricks that many people tend to disregard.
Colors
On social media, colors are an incredibly powerful tool that really can make or break your entire strategy. If you fail to choose and pair them in a way that’s true to your goals and the overall aesthetics of your brand, potential customers might view you as inconsistent, chaotic, or even quite messy. When choosing the colors to represent your brand, consider the following points:
- What’s your target audience?
- What kind of feeling do you want people to associate with your brand?
- How do you want to make your audience feel?
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Knowing the answers to these questions will help you set your mind on one particular color palette and make sticking to it as well as being consistent much easier in the long run. To make the most out of the shades and tones you choose, take time to play around with the color wheel.
Consider also learning more about color psychology. For example, tripplo uses red on their website since it attracts the most attention, evokes the excitement connected with traveling, and compels the visitors into action.
Balance
At first, learning to balance the design of your social media images might be quite challenging, but it’s definitely worth the effort. First of all, you need to keep in mind that different elements of your pictures carry different weights. Therefore, if you choose to add lots of filters and busy textures to each of the images you post, your feed might look too busy, chaotic, and simply won’t be pleasant to look at.
Similarly, when trying to keep up with the latest trends, you might post a few videos, vector graphics, or animated images in a row. Still, then all your posts will end up looking the same, and people will be more likely to just scroll through them without paying attention to your message. That’s why you should spend more time playing around with the visual effects you want to use instead of choosing one style you like and applying it to every picture you post.
Tip: try to make things more visually interesting by changing the size of items, their lightness and darkness, warm and cool tones, texture, the number of objects, and their orientation (vertical/horizontal/diagonal).
Hierarchy
When putting an abundance of time and effort into perfecting your pictures, you should also try to ensure that your designs are effective when it comes to communicating the message you want to put out. That’s precisely where visual hierarchy comes into play. It’s all about working with resources such as contrast, typography, spacing, and other basic principles to organize and prioritize your content to enhance everything you’re trying to convey.
For instance, you can consider using the size to either enhance or reduce the visibility of certain elements. By enlarging the dimensions of a certain object, you can give it more visual importance and ensure that it gets noticed.
Conversely, if there’s something that you want to de-emphasize because it’s not as vital to your picture, you can reduce its size. Remember that it’s easy to overwhelm the image by adding too many small details.
Furthermore, you can play with different colors to create contrast and choose different fonts to keep the pictures visually interesting. The look of your fonts alone (whether you go for sans-serif, serif, script, or decorative) and their style (bold, italic, small caps, etc.) can do wonders to your design.
However, using too many free fonts in one picture can cause a mishmash effect that confuses the reader. That’s why you should avoid using more than two or three fonts in one picture.
Have a Strategy
The photo content that you put out should have intent. Therefore, you need a strategy to use as a guide on each step of your journey.
Write Down Your Goals
Outlining your goals is an excellent way to kickstart the process of developing your own strategy. The goals that you choose in the outline should align with the main goals of your brand as well as connect to your niche, though keep in mind that your goals might change or evolve over time.
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For instance, if you’re just starting out, your main objective might be gaining many followers. Once you get there, you might focus on boosting the engagement instead – after all, the number of followers doesn’t mean too much if there are no likes, comments, or shares. That’s why you should try to clarify your current goals and add a note about how you’d like to see them evolve in the future.
Find Best Practices
Another thing you need when navigating the complex world of social media is brand style guidelines.
When developing a strategy, don’t forget to dedicate a chunk of time to focus solely on the social media aspect. This means that besides writing down your goals, you should also outline what subject you want to focus on when adding your carefully curated pictures and what topics shouldn’t be featured.
For instance, if your whole brand is about eco-friendliness and sustainability, you should avoid adding photos that were staged with lots of food or single-use items – your audience might assume it went to waste after the picture has been taken.
Consider Working with Professionals
If your budget allows it, you can consider hiring a professional photographer who will capture the best photos and take care of all the technical aspects of photography.
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When looking for a brand photographer, look for people with experience in the field that’s relevant to your brand or directly related to your niche. Make sure to browse their portfolio in order to learn whether their style aligns with your brand standards and pay attention to the way they edit. If possible, check their pricing structure and licensing agreements to have an idea of what kind of budget you need.
Develop an Aesthetic
These days, the word “aesthetic” gets thrown around a lot. However, not enough business owners take the time to really think about what it means in social media’s hustling and bustling world. In this context, it can be described as the consistent look and feel of your pictures that aligns perfectly with your brand and the way you want people to perceive it.
One of the main benefits of creating your own aesthetic is that not only will it allow you to turn your photos into something that feels new, fresh, and creative, but it will also appeal to your target audience, catch the attention of more prospective customers, and move you a few steps closer to your goals.
Theme
When trying to develop your own aesthetic, consider starting with identifying your theme. For instance, you can decide to go for a bright and colorful or dark and gloomy mood; you can focus on people or nature – the most important thing is that you figure out what you want and stick to it.
SOPs
To ensure that you’re putting out consistent and high-quality content, you should write down your editing standard operating procedures (SOPs). The simple rules that you set for your brand, such as deciding which Instagram filter editor you want to use for every photo, what presets to use consistently, and even deciding if you want to keep the pictures vibrant, matte, or high contrast in general, will help you put out worthwhile content.
Use Free Tools and Resources
Hiring a professional photographer or a graphic designer with lots of experience and knowledge may seem like a great idea, but in reality, it’s not always possible, especially if you’re just starting out or simply have a tight budget.
If that’s the situation you’re in, the good news is that there’s an abundance of free tools available on the internet. For instance, if you’re not an exceptionally skilled designer, but you still need to get some content ready, you can use programs such as Canva or Giphy.
Canva
Canva is a start-to-finish design program that’s incredibly easy to use and will work great for every non-designer. It offers countless premade templates, great-looking fonts, and custom size images for every social media channel, among others.
PhotoADKing
PhotoADKing is a versatile design platform that simplifies the process for non-designers, offering a wide range of tools for creating professional designs. It provides an extensive library of pre-made templates, eye-catching fonts, and customizable images suited for all kinds of marketing materials. Whether you’re working on social media graphics or business promotional content, PhotoADKing makes it easy to produce standout visuals. Its flyer maker feature allows users to design unique, attention-grabbing flyers quickly and efficiently, making it a perfect tool for all your branding and promotional needs.
Giphy
Giphy, on the other hand, is a GIF maker that you can use to create funny and inspirational GIFs from images and video clips. All you need to do is upload your video or image to Giphy, choose the animations you want to add, maybe throw in some text or fun stickers, and create a GIF.
TouchRetouch
If besides creating your own pictures and graphics, you also need a way to touch them up, you can use TouchRetouch. It’s a simple app that allows you to remove any unwanted objects, distractions, or imperfections from your photos. Whether it’s a photo bomber or a strand of flyaway hair, one touch, and it’s gone!
Quozio
Furthermore, social media love inspirational quotes, and posts that contain them tend to work exceptionally well when it comes to generating heaps of engagement. To put them in the form of pictures, you can use Quozio, which is a free quote maker. You can enter a quote, mention (or not) who said it, choose one of the templates, adjust a few more options, and voila!
PosterMyWall
PosterMyWall is an online graphic design software that lets you create stunning promotional graphics and videos without needing any design skills. Customize thousands of templates for posters, flyers, videos, social media posts, and more. Publish designs on social media, send out email campaigns, and publish content directly to your signage screens. Work on the go and collaborate seamlessly with your team. Get started at www.postermywall.com.
Don’t Forget About Words
Infusing your images with some text is an excellent way to make sure that if someone shares your picture, you will still have control over the text they add to it. In other words, it’s worth making sure that your image does all the talking for you.
You can go back to the tips above and follow the hierarchy tip and a tool such as Canva. This way, you will be able to create images that make a statement. However, you need to keep in mind that it’s crucial to avoid overwhelming the image with too much text or creating something that doesn’t align with the caption. Consistency is key.
On top of that, if you make sure that the message on your image is encouraging, funny, or inspiring, you might get more shares. Try not to resort to click-baiting with the text you add, as in the long run, it can end up costing you followers and site visitors.
Final Thoughts on Social Media Pictures
When your goal is creating incredible and attention-grabbing social media pictures, there’s always plenty of room for improvement. Luckily, you’ve got plenty of resources and free tools at your disposal to make your posts look and perform better.
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been managing your brand’s social media for a while, going back to the basics, outlining your strategy, or developing an aesthetic for more visually-pleasing content is always a good choice.
Keep in mind that if you find it hard to juggle all the business operations and find the time to improve your digital marketing efforts, there’s no rule saying you need to do everything yourself. If you feel like you could benefit from it, don’t hesitate to outsource your social media management and try working with professionals. Good luck!
