5 Design Tips That Will Make Your Brand a Success on Social Media





Social media is the new advertising platform that companies cannot afford to skip out on. For businesses, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest are excellent spaces to engage directly with the real people who support you. Why? Because they get direct access to their customers. But how do you engage with your social media followers the right way?


The secret lies in using the right amount of value based posts and interaction contents. Once you publish content, it immediately 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. So if you're thinking about becoming a company with a strong social media presence, here are 5 tips to get you started.


Keep a reference of the content sizes for each social media platform


A reference of social media content sizes and dimensions is a must-have for any designer. This allows you to quickly size your canvases 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 2021, here are the sizes and dimensions for common social media platforms according to Hootsuite:





Create content calendar to schedule a contents


Before you start designing social media posts, it's important to create a content calendar. Keep a track of the best times to post and what types of posts work best.


For example, Facebook tends to rank posts from businesses with the highest engagement rates, while Twitter prefers social media experts over just any user. This content calendar is also a great way to keep track of your campaigns. It makes it easier for you to plan and schedule content for your social media platforms.​



Create interesting and useful content


To engage more audiences on social media, you should research what your audience needs on your social media. What kind of content are they interested in? What are they asking for? And what are they telling you? The best way to know this is to take a look at your competitors.


What types of content are they posting and how often? By looking at your competitors, you'll see what they are doing to drive their followers to interact with them. 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.


Be honest, authentic and informative. You've got to make them feel good about themselves, their job and your brand if you want people to engage with you on social media.


Consistent design themed and layout


Designing content is not only important to have a good head-line, but also a consistent design theme. Keep your content on social media consistent, uniform and easy to read. The importance of consistent design is the theme and layout.


Use the same themed color palette throughout all your social media pages. Make sure that you use a color palette, it can help to grab the attention of your audience and make it a lot more impactful than just using the same color theme everywhere.





Use characteristic and unique layout on your content design. You should use an appropriate layout on your content. Your content will take its own characteristics and uniqueness once it is in a well designed layout. You should come up with something that will make your design unique. This will make your website more interesting and attractive to the users.


Creating a consistent design can help you build your brand identity. It creates a visual language that you can use to communicate effectively with your audience. For instance, Apple has its own design language called “Human Interface Guidelines” that designers use to create interfaces that are consistent across all devices and apps.





Adjust your design based on analytics


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.


With this in mind, you should be prepared to adapt your designs based on analytics data. 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). You can test, quickly know which designs work and don’t work and adjust your design strategy accordingly. Look at how people respond and use the analytics data to help guide your social media efforts and make decisions that will help you reach your goals.