Scientists have shown that the average person blinks 15-20 times per minute.
That’s a lot! And it just goes to show that a lot can happen in a minute, or every four seconds if you do the maths.
So have you ever wondered about how much activity happens on Facebook per minute?
I’ll tell you.
510,000 comments are posted. 293,000 statuses are updated. 136,000 photos are uploaded.
As for Twitter, approximately 350,000 tweets are sent per minute.
That’s a lot of content being published in the blink (or 15-20 blinks) of an eye.
It’s little wonder that capturing your target audience’s attention can be so difficult.
Digital marketers constantly struggle for the attention of their prospects. To survive in this crowded informational marketplace, you need to stand out.
One surefire way to reach out and grab people’s attention is with visual content.
Why visual content?
Successful brands are often successful because they understand the importance of visual content to their social media design.
Human beings are visual creatures. In fact, visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the human brain than text.
Here are a few other interesting stats:
Visme recently asked some top content marketers for their visual content tips, and Jeff Bullas shared the following advice:
Creating great, effective visual content is a combination of using the right tools and testing the content on different networks. This means posting visuals on Twitter or Instagram or streaming video on Facebook or Periscope. Using the resulting data will then allow you to create more of what works. It’s a combination of art (creativity) and the science (data and technology) of effective content marketing.
How to improve your social media designs
Not everybody likes to read and a lot of people rely on their visual perceptions to interpret information.
Eye-catching imagery therefore plays an integral role in improving your reach to your target audience.
We all recognize that producing regular content is a key factor in maintaining a successful brand, but by enhancing your social media design, you can boost your business sales with greater reach and more engagement.
Something as seemingly simple as using a vibrant palette or a punchy font can make all the difference between someone scrolling past your content on their news feed, and someone having a closer look.
I’ve come up with five awesome social media design hacks which I know will help improve your post’s engagement, because they’ve definitely helped mine!
1. Choose a distinctive color combination
Does your brand have a specific color or colors associated with it?
Color is a key part of brand recognition. Color combinations are all-important in the creation of a post’s mood and in setting the visual tone of the content. A recent study found that 90% of snap judgments made about products are based on color alone.
The better the color combination and the more emotions it conveys, the better the odds of your social media images creating an everlasting impression on their audience.
Every color can be used for a different emotion and thus you should use it accordingly. Here’s a little bit of color psychology as it relates to marketing.
Image Source: Visual.ly
You can see that the color combinations you choose really do make a difference to how people perceive and respond to your brand.
2. Keep your design simple
Keep your design simple and easy to relate to, and you’ll increase the odds that people relate to your social media content.
When it comes to visual content, keeping it simple is key as most people like to receive information in a short and sweet manner with no complexity involved.
You can see how Hubspot does this on their Twitter page.
Their clean, sharp graph with a minimalist layout is both eye-catching and sophisticated.
The best thing about deciding to keep things simple when it comes to design is that it also makes content way quicker for you to create, and forces you to break information down into separate posts. This in turn leaves you with plenty of content to post.
3. Show off key information
Lure your audience in by adopting a show, don’t tell, approach. This means using well-designed visuals to direct your audience’s attention to key information, data or figures.
For example, if you were having a 70% off sale, you could make that ‘70%’ pop out of the image by increasing the text size or back-shadowing it in a different colour.
Simply listing information and not visually promoting it won’t get you anywhere.
In today’s digital age, there’s no call for it. Use tools like Bannersnack to get the upper hand on your typographical hierarchy and create imagery that complements what it is you’re discussing.
Remember, unless the graphic you’re posting highlights the right pieces of information and reflects your brand messages in a thoughtful way, it’s basically useless.
4. Master your typographical style
Does your brand have a consistent font that you use across social media platforms?
If not, you need to determine your brand fonts. They reflect your brand personality and reinforce your tone of voice.
The selection of the perfect font or set of fonts must be done through research and analysis. Fonts play a vital role in the overall appearance of social media designs, so here are some basic typographic principles to follow.
Always keep the readability and legibility in mind when selecting fonts. Also remember the importance of context: fonts that look great in headlines may not work as well for body copy.
Well-crafted typography has the power to allow audiences to quickly scan your content, identify the most important elements and make connections between it and other content from your brand.
Make sure you are evoking a particular feeling or fit with the fonts you use, and that you choose them for utility as well as style.
5. Include a strong call to action
Including a strong call to action – in other words, enticing the audience to carry out further actions in the form of purchasing products, goods and services or downloading a resource – is critical to successful social media design.
But it may surprise you to learn that a good call to action doesn’t have to be created through words.
I mentioned earlier that we’re becoming an increasingly visual culture, and the big benefit of this is that you can complement your call to action with an appropriate and effective visual.
A call to action should first and foremost be engaging, so identify an emotion and build your communication around it. For example, a ‘handwritten’ font might prompt audiences to choose your flower delivery service over a competitors because it implies you offer care and consideration.
A call to action should also be a little bit funny, thought-provoking or unique. Focus on the outcomes for customers of engaging with your call, not the call itself – ‘buy it now’ doesn’t entice people to act but ‘join our community’ might.
Summary
Tweaking some elements in your social media images can do wonders for your business and adopting those tips can have a huge impact on the outcome of your social media marketing!
Now it’s your turn – have you ever created visuals for social media? Would you like to share any additional tips?
Guest Author: Kunjal Panchal is a digital strategist and a social media geek. She is passionate about content marketing and strongly believes in the power of storytelling. A perfect day for her consists of reading her favorite author with a hot cup of coffee. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.