Social Media Design Guide: How to establish a distinctive visual strategy
Social media for business is no longer optional. It’s an essential way to establish a community, attract customers, gain valuable insights, and establish a voice unique to your brand and an identity that is unmistakably yours.
The top brands on social media all have something in common: consistency. The foundation for that consistency comes from strong social media design guidelines. As you continue to grow online and in your chosen industry, your design guide will determine how you want people to identify you and what you can do to maintain a cohesive presence.
A style guide is also a sure-fire way to keep your team on the same page. Social team members are only human, so mistakes happen, but a style guide can save you from some slip-ups and iron out any confusion about your brand’s dos and don’ts.
If you’ve been wanting to put together a social media style guide but aren’t sure where to start, keep reading. You’ll learn why a style guide is crucial for your brand, as well as the key components you should include.
What is a social media style guide & why do you need one?
A social media style guide is the go-to source for how your brand appears and acts on social media. It informs your approach to multi-channel content, which in turn shapes what people think of when they hear your name, what they tell others about your brand, and how you make them feel.
It’s important to note that a social media style guide is not the same as your social media marketing strategy. Your strategy will consist of more tactical information such as what and how often you publish to reach your social media goals. Your style guide breaks down how those actions should be represented and conveyed in terms of brand voice. For example, your social media strategy might detail the type of content you plan to publish, whereas your style guide would explain how that content should look when it’s shared.
If you’ve ever seen a brand’s social feed and it looks and feels like it’s managed by 10 different people, chances are they don’t have a style guide in place. No matter how many people handle your profiles, the tone and appearance of every Tweet, Facebook post or Instagram caption should align with the brand you’ve worked so hard to create.
For instance, Dove is all about shattering beauty stereotypes and empowering people of all ages, races, and ethnicities to feel comfortable in their skin. Their messaging on all of their profiles reflects this belief. From their human-focused visuals to the uplifting tone of their posts and hashtags, all their actions are aligned.
Define your visual brand (create a brand book)
A brand visual style guide is a rulebook that explains how an organization presents itself to the world through its logo, font and color selections, photography, and much more. Put another way, it’s a reference tool that helps maintain consistency in what a brand looks, feels, and sounds like. It’s so powerful that some people even call it a brand bible, but don’t let that intimidate you — those are just different names for the same document.
Why is the brand book important?
Think of your brand identity as your company’s personality. It’s how the world recognizes you and begins to trust you. If you see someone change how they look and act all the time, you won’t feel like you know who they are, and you certainly won’t trust them.
And authenticity builds trust. Trust, in turn, builds marketing receptiveness and drives new business. And social media is the best place to get real, hence the connection and importance of the brand book to your social media presence. Look at this as the foundations of a house, without a brand book you can not continue to build walls (create a marketing strategy), nor paint the walls in wonderful colors (implement it on social media and show off to the world.)
Maintain a consistent brand identity
More and more social media channels are making a shift to visual content. Think about it. Facebook and Twitter, born with a focus on text-based statuses, are now packed with visual content. Captions take a backseat on image-centric Instagram and Pinterest. LinkedIn allows sharing of images, videos, and infographics. That’s why your brand’s visual identity is so important to your social media branding strategy. It helps create unity and recognition.
What is a visual identity? It’s a codified system of visual elements that translates your brand into a distinct style. That includes a color palette, typography, illustration style, photo treatment, and more. The key here is visual consistency. You want to build cross-channel recognition with your audiences.
Design with a specific platform in mind
When designing for multiple social media platforms, the most significant challenge is balancing the consistency of functionality and branding with the conventions of individual platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others all contain their unique guidelines,
Your social media branding strategy can take many forms. What type of content will work best for your brand? Well, it all starts with your message. If you have an in-depth story to tell, a motion graphic gives you space to do that. Or, if you want to focus on sharing 1 key data point, a mini-infographic might be the perfect fit.
Once you’ve chosen the general shape of your message, it’s time to get specific. All your social media channels have different limitations for the type of content that can be posted. A great example of this is video duration. For Instagram, it’s a max of 60 seconds. For Twitter, it’s 140 seconds. And keep in mind that the maximum isn’t always the ideal length. Case in point: LinkedIn allows native video up to 10 minutes long. Most of the time, though, a 90-second video will far outperform a 10-minute video. And if you want to share your motion graphic across channels, it needs to fit the restrictions of all of them. So be strategic with your video marketing.
And what about static content? Ideal dimensions vary across platforms, but simple re-sizing can help with that. More on that in the next section.
Know the right dimensions
Awkwardly cropped photos and pixelated images are a fast way to kill your social media engagement. But figuring out social media image sizes for each platform is tricky, especially considering how many different image options each platform offers. For this post, we’ll focus specifically on the social media images you share with your updates.
Using the ideal image size for each type of post on every platform is crucial. If you want to prevent people from scrolling right past your content, you have to share eye-catching images that display well in the feed.
Sprout Social has a great always up-to-date list of the latest recommended image sizes for each social media platform. Just bookmark it, and remember to check it once in a while, if any updates occur, they will be listed on the link.
Safe zones
When it comes to sharing content across various social media platforms, one size certainly does not fit all.
Understanding the safe zones for each platform is key to maintaining a clean and professional online presence.
A “Safe Zone” refers to the area in which you want to contain the most important information to avoid it getting cut off by text, buttons, or preview cropping.
Instagram, Facebook, and Medium are great examples of platforms that will crop your post into a smaller preview, requiring users to enlarge the post to see its full details.
An important text in this announcement gets cropped when Safe Zones are not taken into account.
Medium has special grids or safe zone that limit your design to where it should go.
Understanding each channel’s core audience
It’s important to maintain your brand’s visual identity across social media channels. But don’t make the mistake of simply cross-posting the same visual content everywhere. Why? Your LinkedIn followers probably have different interests than your Twitter followers. The demographics of core users may be different, too. So remember to tailor your subject matter and tone to fit each audience.
Another important factor to think about is that each social channel has a different pace. Your content needs to fit the user’s experience. Should you share something with a memorable visual impact that can be quickly consumed during a scrolling binge? Or a deeper dive for a user who’s on the hunt for specific information? This will help you decide what type of content to create and share on each channel.
How and when to reuse designs (recycle designs)
Brands often make one of these 2 social media mistakes. Some brands don’t have a consistent brand identity. Each channel feels disconnected. Maybe some channels are active while others lay dormant. What’s the result? The channels don’t boost each other, and the overall brand is weakened.
Other brands have the opposite problem. All their social media channels post identical content at the same time. What’s the problem here? It solves the consistency issue. But in doing so, it creates another issue. Your different social media channels are now offering the same content, which means they’re not effectively boosting each other. Now they compete. Your audience has no reason to follow your brand on more than one channel.
Keep in mind that each of your social channels needs to offer something slightly distinct. They need to amplify each other, not clone each other.
So, is it okay to reuse your visual content? Yes! But be strategic in how you do it. There are many ways you can create efficiencies.
- First: lean on your established visual identity. This will make your design process faster and more agile. And of course, it helps to harmonize everything you create.
- Next: resize static content to fit the right dimensions for each social channel. It’s a good idea to cross-post some things, particularly static content that drives engagement to a larger piece like a microsite or a motion graphic.
- Finally: repurpose content by transforming it in some way. For example, if you’ve created a new motion graphic for LinkedIn, create a GIF by looping a scene from the motion graphic and sharing it on Twitter.
Adjust your design based on analytics
The good news is that the speed with which social media moves gives you fast results. 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). With this in mind, you can test, quickly know which designs work and don’t work, and adjust your design strategy accordingly.
From a numbers standpoint, what defines a successful post depends on your particular following. It is helpful to create benchmarks based on your best and worst-performing content to have a sense of metrics that indicate success or failure within the context of your other content. Keep in mind that there can also be other factors in poor content performance — such as the time of posting, the ever inscrutable algorithm, real-world events that might have your followers’ attention elsewhere, or plain bad luck.
A/B testing is one useful tool that can help you rule out flukes or decide which design variants are the best option. In addition to the platform-specific analytics (that usually reveal things like impressions, views, and watch time in the case of video), tools like UTM codes added to your CTA links will let you know which specific posts earned traffic.
Bonus tip: Make a “Don’t Do” list
Nearly as significant as what you post on your social media channels is what you don’t post. Create a standard for the sorts of a substance you don’t post.
This could incorporate colors you don’t utilize, fonts you never use or pair (yes comic sans, we are talking about you), the sorts of pictures to maintain a strategic distance from, and indeed specific words or phrases that don’t adjust together with your brand.
You can incorporate this into your style/design guide or keep it as a separate document. In either case, make beyond any doubt your design team is on board with these “rules” and principles of what should never go “viral” on your profiles.
Wrapping it up: the power of social media design
Social media is an exceptionally competitive field, and it takes a lot of arranging and difficult work to succeed, both on the substance and the planning front. In any case, the outcomes merit making progress. Not only is social media worthy for drawing in leads, converting them to users/buyers, and brand awareness, it’s the place where you get to have genuine cooperation with the audience. And last but not least, it’s called social media since it should be an entertaining, fun way to be connected, inspired, and even educated.
Spice up your social media design and don’t be afraid to let your brand shine bright.
