What is social media design?

Social media design is the design, development, and creation of visual content for social media platforms. Investing in design helps brands build awareness and create content that resonates with their target audience.

Today, social platforms are often the first place consumers discover brands. Therefore, creating a great first impression is the first step to building a strong social media presence.

Your social media design will also impact brand perception. Every post you create and publish tells a story and contributes to your brand image. You need to make sure that this story is consistent with your brand and connects with your audience.

This is especially important on platforms that prioritize visual elements, such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. If you want to be successful you need to make your design consistent across all platforms.

Choose a package!

The price of the package will be invoiced and settled on the basis of the service contract after its completion.

Insta miniTemplates provided in Canva

185 €

Page

4×3-as Instagram feed design
5 Instagram Post Template
5 Instagram Story templates
10 highlights cover images
1 scrapbooking poster (10 pages)

I am interested

Social Gurustrategy / insta / fb / signature

250 €

Month

Instagram mini package+
Strategy and competition analysis
Fb cover and profile photo
5 Insta/Fb ads
Allocation schedule

I am interested

What to consider when planning your social media posts

The first important aspect is your brand identity – your social media platform will be a visual representation of this, so you and your team need to have a clear idea of what it is. The next step is to conduct market research to understand your audience. These answers will serve as a frame of reference for your design. What questions do you need to answer successfully? Let’s see:

Who do you want to address?
What does your audience value?
What are they interested in?
What do they do?
What do they like to see on social media?

Then you need to look at your competitors’ social media presence. You may already have a plan and an idea in your head, but it’s useful to know what visual strategies they’re using and how their consumers are responding. The more information you have the better prepared you will be to design a creative interface that is in line with your audience’s needs and tastes.

Tips for designing social media posts

1. Strive for consistency and cohesion.

Consistency is key when designing a social media site. Why? Because it helps brand recognition. Imagine if every time you saw a brand, you changed the brand colours and logo. You’d probably mistake it for another brand, or forget it altogether. Brand recognition is important for building trust and loyalty with your audience. Don’t have a logo or branding yet? Click here!

Beyond regular posting, consistency on social media also means sticking to a visual theme. Dark and moody or light and airy? Do you want your page to convey calm, excitement, balance, focus or something else? Whatever your answer to these questions, it should be reflected in a cohesive design. One way to do this is to use the same filter or editing style on all images to fit your brand image.

2. Use colours that reflect your brand identity.

It’s no surprise that colours influence how consumers perceive your brand. This is why popular food brands are usually associated with red and yellow, and financial institutions with blue. There are also a few ways to incorporate colour into your social media design, such as templates. If you plan to use templates when posting graphics, it’s a good idea to incorporate the main colours of your brand to increase brand recognition. For images and videos, you can also highlight certain colours to stand out from the crowd. Not sure how to create templates? Leave it to me!

As an example, I’ve used the Insta page of my friend Tiago, who makes brown leather artisan boots and his partner Julia is a photographer. They are both nature-loving, simple people with a rural lifestyle. They consistently use earth tones in their community appearances, browns, beiges, and pastels and strive to convey a sense of life. While there may be other colours in their images, these colours are always the focus.

Another strategy that works well is to design your social media posts to match a theme and colour. For example, let’s say you’re a fashion brand and you’re designing content for February. Since February is associated with Valentine’s Day and the colour red, you can build your creative assets around the theme of the month.

3. Use social media design templates.

If you want to plan your social media strategy, you will probably need templates. These can be a huge time saver and ensure consistent branding. Platforms such as Canva, make it easier for teams to create and share templates approved by the brand strategy and aligned with the brand identity.

For a long time, I was averse to using Canva, after almost 20 years of using graphics software I thought it didn’t give me anything extra. Then one of my clients asked me if I could use it to create templates for social media posts because he would like to edit them in the future, but he doesn’t know Photoshop or any other graphics software. I signed up for the platform (PRO is free to try for 30 days) and after a few hours of Canva tutorial videos, I was completely hooked. It’s simple, it’s great, and it offers just enough to manage your social media with confidence. In the pro version, you can even schedule your posts. If you don’t know how to get started, buy one of my packages and I’ll create templates to match your look and show you the basics of using Canva.

4. Tailor your design to the needs of the platform.

Each platform has different sizing and content guidelines. Instagram Reels (short video content), for example, is formatted for viewing on smartphones, which means that videos should be shot in portrait orientation. Facebook, on the other hand, like YouTube, has formatted its videos for landscape. For videos, in particular, it is best to avoid content with a black sidebar, as this is not visually appealing.

In addition to sizing, you should also consider whether the platform is suitable for the content you want to share. Breaking content into text units is a better strategy here, for example.

5. Follow best design practices.

The main goal of social media design is to create visually appealing content that grabs the attention of the audience and encourages them to participate. While this is influenced by a number of factors, there are some general design rules that are known to create attractive visual elements. The first is white or negative space, which is when an area in your frame is left blank. Using white or negative space helps to focus the eye on what you want to draw the audience’s attention to. To read more of these tips, visit my BLOG page.