Social media takes a lot of work, and your success often comes down to the content you share. Is it engaging and conversational? Does it provide value to your audience? Does it easily catch someone’s eye as they’re scrolling? While there’s a lot to consider when it comes to succeeding with social media, we’re going to be focusing on one of the most important elements: social media graphics.
Venngage surveyed over 200 content marketers to learn about how they incorporate visual content into their marketing strategy. They found that social media was a major use case for visual content, with 49% of marketers using them for Facebook, 47% for Instagram, 42% for LinkedIn and 33% using them for Twitter.
If you’re a marketer trying to create social media graphics that not only look great, but enhance the performance of your social media campaigns, read on!
In this article we’ll walk you through:
With over 4 billion people using social media worldwide, having a cohesive and thought out social media strategy, brand and voice is critical for success. Visuals are a critical part of that strategy. In fact, when people hear information, they’re likely to only remember 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
Clearly, it's important to use great visuals in your social posts!
Now that we’ve covered the why you need killer designs in your social strategy, let’s walk through what social media graphics are and how to best use them for your brand.
Before we dive in, let’s quickly define what a social media graphic is:
There are many factors that go into creating compelling graphics for social media. Let’s walk through a few:
How do people make cool Instagram graphics?
You know what feeds we’re talking about— everything seems to fit together perfectly with touches of their brand throughout. Well, this too can be your company’s grid!
Below are some of the best online tools to create your own social content.
Canva is the ultimate editing app that makes it easy for people without graphic design skills to create professional-level images. With easy-to-use drag and drop features, Canva is a versatile graphic design app that helps you create things like Instagram stories, videos, logos, posters, and much more.
Perfect for: Marketers who are on a budget and need to create a wide range of designs.
Venngage is a graphic design software that enables people to create posters, reports, infographics, and presentations. Similar to Canva, Venngage offers easy-to-use drag and drop features. They also have thousands of templates at your disposal, making it easy to get started on any visual.
Perfect for: Marketers looking to create engaging infographics with little-to-no design skills.
Adobe Spark enables you to easily create stunning social graphics, web pages, and short videos. If you’re asking yourself, how can I make a social media template? With Adobe Spark, users can access free and exclusive professionally designed templates, filters, fonts, shapes, and icons from the Adobe Spark web and mobile apps.
Perfect for: Marketers with little-to-no design abilities who are looking to create engaging web pages. Also, great for marketing teams with access to the Adobe Creative Suite (because then it's free).
Visme is a content creation tool that enables people to translate data into engaging visuals. Work individually or as a team to collaborate on presentations, infographics and other visual formats.
Perfect for: Marketers with little-to-no design abilities who are looking to create engaging diagrams and common design assets.
Moral of the story? You don’t have to be a designer to create great marketing designs for social media. Any of the above tools will be able to help speed along the creation of your social media assets, and likely level up those designs too.
And remember, being a bit "clickbait-y" isn't a bad thing either. More about that here.
Need a little social media design inspiration? Let’s have a look at these real life examples to inspire your next design.
Avery Francis, Founder of Build with Bloom created a powerful series focused around the Black Lives Matter movement with the use of simple design. As you scroll through your Instagram feed, it’s hard not to stop and go through the rest of the images in this post. In fact, these posts initially garnered her 10,000 new Instagram followers (which skyrocketed further shortly after). She now has over 83,000 followers and growing!
Things we like:
Regardless of social media channels, Trello always does an incredible job of staying true to their brand, from colors to design elements. They also always include some form of their cute characters, which is another consistent element of their brand.
Things we like:
What works best about this social media graphic? Not only do the bright colours make this post stand out in the feed, but it’s the exact same design of the packaging you’re used to walking past in the grocery store. Popsicle has done an awesome job of creating a social design that’s familiar, eye catching, and easy to engage with.
Things we like:
For most people, Starbucks is a common coffee shop where you go to order a coffee, sit down, maybe do some work and then go on with your day. But, Starbucks also has a long line of coffee beans, accessories, and more for purchasing as well. Using a solid Pinterest strategy, Starbucks has created several boards that share recipes for making your favorite Starbucks drink from the comfort of your own home. What’s great about these pins is that they’re able to market to a DIY audience in the best way possible: by allowing them to create things themselves.
Things we like:
TikTok is known for it’s viral trends. Once a trend gets picked up, everyone wants to create their own version of it. Chipotle knew that when they decided to hop on the Adele trend as they recreated a concert hall where the guacamole is Adele and all of the nacho chips are her audience. Brilliant, hilarious, and on-trend!
Things we like:
What do all of these social examples have in common? Strong branding and compelling visuals!
It’s clear how important compelling graphics are to any social media strategy. Even when it comes to YouTube, there's so many elements that require smart design. But, before you go about creating your next set of designs, remember the tips mentioned earlier:
If you want to learn more about social media graphics, you can watch this video from Visme here. But, if you’d like to bring on some experts to help, Superside offers marketing design services and social media design help from small shops to big brands.
Each session features speakers from companies like Amazon, PUMA and Twitch Prime, tackling the intersection of marketing and design. Live Q&A, highly interactive with actionable tips!
Cassandra King is Superside's Head of Content & Community. She’s a road trip aficionado, advocate for all things glitter, and can usually be found with a camera (or snacks) in hand. Find her on IG @casssandra.king.
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