Over 3.2 billion images are posted on social media daily. This means there are so many images your brand’s social media posts have to compete with.
Thus, to stand out and be noticed by your audience, you have to do more than create basic social media posts. You should create attention-grabbing visuals that appeal to your audience. This way, you can capture their interests, get them to consume your content, and also take desired actions that will help your business grow online.
But how do you create engaging social media posts that drive results without prior design knowledge or experience? This article will show you how. It contains six actionable tips to help you create the best visuals that engage and compel your audience on social media.
Let’s get right into it.
Six expert ways to make your social media posts visuals better engaging
These practical tips are simple yet effective to help you engage and connect better with your audience through your social media visuals. Check them out below:
1. Know your audience
Understanding your audience is essential to creating an engaging design for your audience on social media. This is because although compelling images are excellent at evoking emotions in your audience, it can happen only when the pictures resonate with them. Therefore, conduct detailed audience research before creating your social media posts.
Who is your audience on social media? What are their interests? These questions will help you figure out what types of visuals will resonate better with them. This way, you can create visuals your audience will engage with.
Furthermore, understanding your audience will help you create social media images that your target audience will find difficult to resist. While they are scrolling through a thousand pictures on their social media feeds, they won’t be able to scroll past your posts because your visuals will speak directly to them.
2. Use an online graph maker
Social media graphs are one of the best visuals to connect and engage with your audience. They are compelling and descriptive, so they effectively explain your products’ offerings, features, and benefits.
However, creating social media graphs isn’t the easiest thing, especially when making them professional and attention-grabbing. Thankfully, an online graph maker comes in handy in scenarios like this. They help to simplify your social media graph creation experience by streamlining the process.
Social media professionals understand that posting visual content leads to better levels of engagement, which leads to increased brand visibility, marketing reach, and ROI. However, with access to large volumes of data, marketers frequently struggle to choose what they need to gauge success, leaving them confused and unable to make any decisions.
Using data visualization can help them make judgments about their social media content more accurate and timely. Data visualization approaches help in data comprehension. Graphs, charts, and dashboards not only assist to demonstrate current trends but also to create data narratives. They also allow decision-makers to make vital future decisions. A graph maker is vital in this setting for how data is represented, presented, and, most importantly, digested.
Additionally, they are effective in keeping your social media visuals professionally-looking. All images, colors , and icons will be in their appropriate forms, making them visually stunning to capture your audience’s attention.
3. Follow basic design principles
The fundamentals of designs are critical to follow if you are looking to create engaging social media visuals for your audience. This includes emphasis, contrast, balance and alignment, and white space.
Emphasis directs your audience’s focus to the most crucial part of your visual. So, if you want your audience to pay more attention to a particular part of your image, you can employ the emphasis rule.
This includes enlarging or making the specific text brighter. The balance and alignment principle ensures your images aren’t clumsy, so they are not all in your viewers’ faces.
This means preventing too many heavy elements in a specific part of the image or lighter elements on the other side. Essentially, both sides of your pictures should mix heavy and light elements in the right proportion.
The contrast principle can help you achieve balance and emphasis with your designs. They also have a way to make your visuals pop better, so they become more noticeable.
White space declutters your designs, so they don’t look too busy for your readers. They create space on your designs to make your visuals look clean, organized, and uncluttered.
An effective way to achieve more white space is to remove unsightly and unnecessary image backgrounds. Tools like Picsart can help with this, seamlessly eliminating distracting backdrops and highlighting the important aspects of your visuals. This allows for a more professional and engaging visual content that resonates with your audience.
Validate your concepts for performance during the design stage with AI-generated attention analytics
4. Have a text hierarchy
Text hierarchy is crucial to help your audience understand your main message immediately and focus on essential information. Without text hierarchy, your audience may be unable to walk away with the most critical information they need to know.
Therefore, when creating your visuals, one of the questions that you should ask is: “what critical message do I want to pass across?” After finding an answer to this question, ensure to highlight this information in your design so it’s what your audience sees first when viewing your visuals.
After this, arrange the text to ensure the following prominent information is what your audience needs to know. One way to figure this out is to ask, “what’s the next information my audience needs to know?” This answer will help you create a social media visual with a practical text hierarchy that passes your messages across to your audience in the best way possible.
For example, to boost HCP engagement for healthcare business, you need to use relevant texts in your graphics that connect with your audience
5. Use the right image size
No matter how visually compelling your visual content is, using the wrong image size will water down its effect. This is because the images are either cropped out or stretched, so your audience won’t view your content clearly as part of the images will either be expanded or cut out.
To prevent this, rather than use the same image size across every social media platform, follow the preset image size for each social media platform you post on.
Additionally, the image sizes you use depend on the type of image you want to post. For example, the image size for a Facebook profile picture is different from a Facebook cover and banner picture. Similarly, when it comes to Instagram, it’s essential to be aware of the optimal image sizes and dimensions to ensure your posts look their best. Whether you’re sharing a captivating photo or a visually appealing graphic, understanding the recommended Instagram image size and dimensions is key to maintaining a polished and professional presence on the platform.
6. Optimize your images for SEO
You can create an SEO-optimized visual just as you would with a blog post on your website. You can do this in different ways. First, you can name your videos and images using specific keywords your audience is searching for.
Second, you can insert the keywords in your videos, video title, or in your caption on social media. Third, you can use hashtags with relevant keywords. Following these SEO practices will rank your visuals on social media and allow your target audience to find your content easily. The result of this is increased reach and engagement that boosts your online presence.
Reasons to create engaging visuals on social media
There are several reasons to invest in engaging social media visuals. Let’s check out a few:
1. Engaging visuals are attention-grabbing
One of your core goals online is to attract your audience’s attention as a brand. Because when you capture their interest, they will notice your brand, which gives you a higher chance of converting them to customers.
Compelling visuals show rather than tell. With a few words and stunning visuals, you can show your audience a lot about your brand. They will reveal your personality, which grabs your audience’s attention and hooks them to your brand.
What is more, algorithm can show you how much user attention a specific object gets. Attention Insight is one of AI-powered design analytics tools where algorithm uses warm-to-cold colours to display which areas get more attention, by instantly creating AI heatmaps with the most eye-catching parts of your design.
2. They make your content easier to consume
Engaging social media visuals aren’t dull, overwhelming, or cluttered, making it easier for your audience to digest your content. Rather than a messy image, your audience will see well-organized visuals with the correct alignment and balance, which encourages them to view your visuals.
Additionally, they make your content easier to understand. Because there’s an adequate emphasis, text hierarchy, as well as other design elements that keep your messages clear, your audience leaves your page with the perfect understanding of the message you intended to deliver. In return, it speeds up your conversion rate and ensures your social media marketing effort isn’t going down the drain.
3. Engaging visuals are memorable
The more engaging your visuals are, the longer they will stay on your audience’s minds. This is because people tend to remember visually compelling and relatable content. Therefore, by focusing on creating engaging visuals your audience can connect with, you allow your brand to stay memorable.
4. They stir action
The best way to get your audience to do what you want them to do is to tell them to do so in an engaging way, especially on social media. Their attention span is short, and with other posts competing for their attention, the only way to get them to consume your content and take the desired action is to make your visuals engaging.
Engaging visuals connect with your viewers’ emotions and inspire them to take action. This way, you get your audience to click the “call-to-action” button often when viewing your visuals on social media.
Conclusion
Visuals are influential in driving engagement, increasing your brand awareness, and boosting your conversion rate on social media. But this only happens when they are engaging.
To help you create engaging social media visuals that enable you to reach your social media marketing goals, this article discussed six practical tips. Use these tips to get the best results with your visual content on social media.
