How Do You Create Compelling Visual Content for Social Media?
In the fast-paced world of social media, creating content that captivates is crucial. We’ve gathered insights from industry experts including commercial photographers and directors of content to share their best practices. From the importance of brand consistency and quality to designing informative infographics, explore sixteen expert tips to elevate your social media visuals.
How Do You Create Compelling Visual Content for Social Media?
Tip 1
Follow Brand Consistency And Quality
Jace Oner, Commercial Photographer, Curves And Grain Photo Agency
Creating compelling visual content for social media requires a strategic approach encompassing consistency, quality equipment, and effective planning through mood boards.
Maintaining visual consistency across social platforms reinforces brand identity and audience recognition. Develop a comprehensive brand style guide defining colors, fonts, imagery style, and tone. Refer to it consistently for uniformity. Canva’s Brand Kit stores logos, colors, and fonts, ensuring adherence to brand guidelines effortlessly.
Investing in appropriate equipment enhances visual quality, especially for videography or photography. Choose cameras suited to your needs and budget, prioritizing features like low-light performance and image stabilization. DxOMark offers reviews and ratings for cameras and lenses, aiding informed decisions based on objective tests and user feedback.
Mood boards serve as visual roadmaps, guiding aesthetics, color palettes, and overall mood. Curate images, color swatches, typography, and design elements reflecting your brand’s visual identity. Platforms like Pinterest allow easy creation and sharing of digital mood boards.
Effective social media content hinges on consistency, quality equipment, and strategic mood boarding. Implementing these tips elevates brand presence, engages audiences, and differentiates content effectively.
My top tip is to develop a strong brand strategy before creating a set of go-to social media templates. If you are unsure about creating these templates or your branding elements, consider hiring a professional designer. With a clear brand strategy and templates in place, creating social media content becomes much easier.
Furthermore, having a consistent style builds trust and encourages your target audience to interact with your brand or buy your products. Consistency in your visual and messaging elements promotes brand recognition over time. This strategic approach ultimately saves you time and effort, allowing you to focus on expanding your business.
Tip 3
Rank Items For Shareable Graphics
Tristan Harris, Demand Generation Senior Marketing Manager, Thrive Digital Marketing Agency
We utilize data to rank items, often creating graphics for “Top 10” lists, because this approach significantly enhances the shareability of our content. These rankings are not only attention-grabbing but also succinctly organize information in a way that is easily digestible and engaging for viewers.
Whether it’s the top travel destinations, must-have tech gadgets, or most effective marketing strategies, presenting information in a ranked format appeals to a wide audience and drives higher interaction and sharing on social media.
When creating visual content for social media, it is crucial to prioritize entertainment. Captivate your audience by using memes, and ensure that your content prompts active engagement. Avoid stock photos, and consistently deliver fresh, original material that resonates with your audience. Instead of using images, focus on creating short videos, as short-form content is currently trending. Share your brand messaging within the first 30 seconds of the video.
Tip 5
Capture Unique Visual Perspectives
Joy Nyargem, Founder and Chief Content Creator, Afrostylicity
As a travel content creator, visual storytelling is a big part of my work. My go-to practice for creating compelling visual content is to seek out unique perspectives. I constantly challenge myself to find unexpected angles or vantage points that offer a fresh take on even the most photographed subjects.
For instance, when capturing a luxury hotel room, instead of the standard wide-angle shot of the entire space, I might focus on an artful close-up of one aspect of the hotel room or frame the cityscape view through the curve of a freestanding bathtub. This approach sets my content apart and encourages my followers to see familiar settings through new eyes, sparking their imagination and desire to experience these places for themselves.
One of the best ways to create compelling visual content for social media is by leveraging contrast. Contrast isn’t just about using bright colors; it’s about balancing light and dark elements, different textures, or even varied shapes to draw attention to key parts of your image. When done right, it makes your visuals pop and naturally guides the viewer’s eye to where you want it to go.
For instance, if you’re highlighting a new product, placing it against a background that starkly contrasts with its color can make it more noticeable. This technique not only enhances aesthetic appeal but also improves readability and engagement. Also, be mindful of how different elements interact within your frame. Use contrasting fonts or text colors to make your copy stand out against the background, ensuring your message gets across clearly. Contrast is a simple yet powerful tool to ensure your visuals get the attention they deserve on social media.
Incorporating motion into your visual content for social media can significantly enhance its appeal and engagement because, whether through videos, GIFs, or animations, it naturally draws the person’s eye and keeps their attention longer than static images. Moving elements can tell a story more dynamically and evoke emotions more powerfully, making your content more memorable. A great example of this is that a short video can demonstrate a product’s features and benefits in a way that a photo cannot, and an animated infographic can make complex information more accessible and engaging.
Businesses can easily leverage motion by using accessible tools and platforms. Creating short, high-quality videos is simpler than ever with smartphone cameras and editing apps like InShot or Adobe Premiere Rush. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are designed to highlight video content, providing built-in editing tools and templates to streamline the creation process. Using GIFs or animated text in posts can also add a fun and interactive element with minimal effort.
Size your images to specification. Sharing wrongly-sized visual content on social media can be catastrophic. For instance, images with the wrong aspect ratio or low resolution can be cropped and stretched out of proportion, which reflects poorly on your business brand. Every social media platform has its own specifications that you must understand and tailor your content accordingly.
For example, the recommended image size for Facebook Stories, Reels, and TikTok videos is 1080 x 1920 px, while the recommended image size for a cover photo is 1500 x 1500 px. We always aim for the highest image quality (pixels and resolution). We also pay attention to the aspect ratio because some social media platforms, such as Facebook, usually auto-crop pictures and video previews based on the aspect ratio. If your aspect ratio is different, you may end up with an awkward crop or have critical details left out.
I believe color is more than just decoration; it’s a powerful language that speaks directly to our emotions and perceptions. By understanding and implementing the principles of color theory, you can create visuals that catch the eye and resonate deeply with your audience. Whether you are using complementary colors to amplify contrast and emphasis or choosing hues that align with your brand’s identity, each shade holds the potential to evoke specific feelings and associations.
Through thoughtful selection and application of color, you will transform simple images into compelling narratives, inviting viewers to connect, engage, and remember. Color isn’t just a tool—it’s the palette from which we paint stories that captivate and inspire.
If you’re planning on using your own photos instead of using stock images, here are a few pointers. Define your brand aesthetic, first and foremost. You have to know what look and feel you want your brand to represent because all your images will adhere to this formula.
Consistency is key in creating highly compelling visual content on social media. So, consider the colors, composition, and mood that will best convey your brand and how you want it to be perceived by your target audience.
When editing the photos you’ve taken, don’t overdo it. Overprocessing your photos can create a disconnect between what your products look like in real life versus in pictures, which could make you appear dishonest and untrustworthy.
Be original. To stand out, you need to stand out, and by that, I mean look at the other content that’s trending and either improve on it from a design perspective or create visuals that contrast with it.
I like to use GIFs with humorous memes. This allows a simple animation element to catch the eye and can add a splash of comedy.
Set dark-tone backgrounds to stand out in the white space of the feed. Then overlay high-contrasting foregrounds or outline the elements in the foreground to make them pop.
Make a compelling headline to make engagement irresistible: “You wouldn’t believe how he made this content…”
One tip for creating compelling visual content for social media is to leverage the power of negative space. Negative space, or the breathing room in your visuals, can make your content stand out and deliver your message more effectively. This strategy enhances focus and clarity, establishes a visual hierarchy, and provides a modern aesthetic that appeals to viewers.
We applied this technique for one of our insurance clients targeting senior service providers. By consistently implementing our negative-space approach, we organically increased their followers from 102 to 284 in just three months. Each post attracts an average of 1,545 impressions and significant engagement, demonstrating the power of well-crafted visual content.
Utilizing negative space effectively involves leaving room to breathe, using asymmetry strategically, and making thoughtful background choices, which together create visually appealing and highly engaging posts.
When making a thumbnail, or social media posts and graphics, the one thing you should consider is having a strip in the bottom 10–15% of the screen, which takes approximately 5% of the screen height. Such a strip should go from left to right. It will catch the eye of the viewer, and if the rest of your thumbnail is compelling, you should get the click-through rate to a higher level.
Such an eye-catching design element can be incorporated into your graphics and used for various topical clusters. For example, a red strip for important news, yellow for a different topic, and green for internal news. No matter the exact design, as long as it catches the eye of a reader and improves your CTR, you’re set up for an improvement.
There is no dearth of slick, high-quality, and attractive visual content on social media, so for your content to elicit engagement, you need to create something that has more than visual appeal. One important tip is to use text in visuals smartly, as the right amount can pique the audience’s curiosity, whereas too much can be overwhelming. When using text-based visuals, remember to keep the focus on visuals and use text as a supplemental tool to add more crucial information that cannot be expressed visually.
Tip 15
Create Quality, Storytelling Visuals
Suhasini Gopal, Social Media Manager, SPM Global Technologies Pvt Ltd
Pictures and videos are like magic tricks on social media—they make people stop and look! With everyone bombarding feeds with words, cool visuals are the key to getting noticed. Here’s how to create awesome social media pics and videos that will make your brand a star:
- Quality Counts – Don’t post blurry pics! Invest in good-quality photos and videos that show your stuff clearly. Think bright and sharp, not dark and grainy.
- Pick Your Colors – Colors can set the mood, just like music. Choose colors that match your brand’s style. Fun and bright for a young vibe, or classic and cool for a more serious feel. Play with contrasting colors to make things pop, or use empty spaces for a clean look.
- Picture Perfect – Don’t just take any old pic! Think about how your eye moves across the image. Imagine dividing the picture into thirds—put the important stuff where the lines meet for a more interesting look. Leave some empty space around things to make them breathe. Play with angles, like taking a picture from above or below, to add some fun.
- Tell a Story – People love stories! Use your pictures and videos to show something happening. Show your product being used, happy customers enjoying it, or a behind-the-scenes peek at your awesome team. A great picture or video can create a connection that words just can’t.
- Words Help Too – Sometimes a short message can make your pic even better. Add a call to action (like telling people to visit your website), a funny comment, or a question to get people talking. Keep it short and sweet, and use easy-to-read fonts.
- Move It, Move It! – In a world full of still pictures, stand out with animation and moving graphics! These eye-catching things can show how your product works, explain something tricky in a fun way, or just add a little pizzazz to your brand.
- Fan Power – Let your fans be your cheerleaders! Run contests where people share pictures or videos related to your brand. This gets people talking and adds a real touch to your social media presence.
- Different Platforms, Different Rules – Each social media app is like its own little world. Instagram loves beautiful pics and short videos, while Twitter prefers quick visuals that go with your text. Figure out the best sizes and formats for each app so your stuff looks great. Remember, consistency is key! Keep your pictures and videos looking the same way across all your platforms so people recognize you instantly.
Tip 16
Design Informative Infographics
Marco Genaro Palma, Freelance CMO and SEO Consultant, GenaroPalma.com
Infographics are an awesome way to turn complex information into something visually appealing and easy to understand. They break down data into engaging visuals that your audience will love. Tools like Piktochart and Venngage make it super easy to create infographics that highlight industry trends, offer tips, or showcase key statistics.
For my clients, good infographics have been very useful. Not only do they boost engagement, but they’ve also helped them gain free organic backlinks. When you create high-quality infographics, other websites love to share and cite them, which naturally improves SEO and increases online visibility.
What are your thoughts on Creating Compelling Visual Content for Social Media?
You’ve heard what the experts had to say, now it is your turn. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
