The complete guide to social media design

By Sourish Joshi (co-founder Rish Official)

Fifteen years ago, you may have gotten away with calling social media a fad. But these days, a social media presence is as essential as a telephone number — and a strategic approach to social media design is how you make sure your followers answer the call.

For businesses, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest are excellent spaces to engage directly with the real people who support you. It’s where you create connections with content that entertains your followers while fostering brand awareness. As helpful as social media is, it is also highly competitive. Once you publish content, it 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. In social media, only the strong survive, but the good news is that standout social media graphics are the best tools in your arsenal to create unique, engaging content.

This ultimate guide to social media design will walk you through the different kinds of social media graphics, how to use them, and, most importantly, how to make them matter.

Social media design overview

• Plan your social media design strategy
• List, brief and schedule your design assets
• Keep a reference of the container sizes and dimensions for each platform

Tips on designing your social media page

• Profile picture design
• Cover image design
• Profile page layout design
• Platform-specific profile branding

5 guidelines for social media content design

• Design content in a way that is useful to your followers
• Incorporate different types of design into your content
• Balance individual content with your overall profile page
• Design themed content and templates
• Adjust your design based on analytics

Plan your social media strategy

The first step in social media design is to create your strategy (or review your existing one). Design should act as an enhancement to your content, facilitating the messages you want to get across, so it’s essential to first create a solid messaging strategy in order to perform well.

1. List, brief, and schedule your design assetsEvaluate the audiences for your current channels. You may already have already conducted target audience research for your overall brand strategy, but the audience for each social media channel will represent a specific segment or cross-section of your larger audience. In order to create the most effective social media design, understand who is currently following your content and what they are looking for. Make sure this is backed by target market research — conduct interviews, and surveys, use the platform’s analytics to find demographic information, and notate the feedback or comments your followers leave. Next, create user personas for your existing audiences in addition to new audiences you want to reach. Personas are important because it’s much easier to design content for a person than for facts and figures.
2. Choose the best platforms to reach your audiences. Social media is necessary for businesses, but that doesn’t mean every social media platform is necessary for every business. For example, recipes perform notoriously well on Pinterest, so while it makes sense for a food brand to invest heavily in that platform, it won’t be as important for, say, a home security brand. Research your many options for social media platforms, and decide on a few based on what is popular within your industry and with your audience. Assuming that you should only use the most popular platforms may lead you to miss out on social media apps with niche audiences that might be perfect for your brand.
3. Evaluate the types of content that perform best on those platforms. Narrowing the scope of your audience and social media channels will allow you to focus on the kinds of content to create and eventually how that content should be designed. Some of the types of content you can create will be set by the platform (Instagram favors imagery and video, Twitter favors short messages and clips). Each platform should have a how-it-works page that will explain the media constraints. Other types of content will be based on common user trends: although people have the ability to create videos and written messages on Facebook, many users use the platform to share article links. Spend some time reviewing user activity, paying close attention to your competitors, to get an idea of how to best use each channel.

Now that you have a better idea of your audience and the channels you’ll be using, you can start mapping out a design pipeline with a series of briefs. This, along with a content calendar, will help keep you organized through the design process. Make sure to document the following:

• Upcoming content plans
• The goal of the content
• Intended audience
• Competitor content examples
• Design medium (photograph, video, illustration, animated gif)
• Caption or text copy
• Design references

Keep a reference of the container sizes and dimensions for each social media platform

A reference to social media content sizes and dimensions is a must-have for any designer. This allows you to quickly size your canvases and adapt designs across different platforms. Social media sizes tend to change now and again, so be sure to update this list regularly. As of June 2020, here are the sizes and dimensions for common social media platforms: