Graphics Design For Social Media Marketing: 12 Tips That Work

Visual content is king on social media. You need it to communicate with your target audience effectively; you cannot separate it from graphics.

Whether you want to grow your followers on Instagram or generate leads on Facebook, you need well-designed graphics to make it happen.

But it isn't enough to design graphics for your social media marketing.

The big question is: does it help you achieve your business goals?

If it doesn't, then know you have been doing it the wrong way.

In this article, I'll show you 12 tips that work when it comes to designing graphics for social media marketing, so you can start implementing them the right way.

Know Your Audience & Have Your On Eyes On The Goal

Before you design graphics for social media, ask yourself who your target audience are, which social media platform are they on, and what goals you want to achieve with them. These are information that give you a perfect picture of designs that can prompt them to take a desired action.

Let's say your audience is on Instagram and you want to promote your new product. Using a graphic that is more text will drive low engagement because IG users engage more with images and videos.

Use The Right Graphics Design Tools

When it comes to graphics design for social media, you are as good as the tool you use. Using the right tools will see you come up with awesome designs while the wrong tool will do otherwise.

Canva, Visme, Adobe Express, and Procreate are common tools you can use for your social media graphics.

And if you want to showcase your artistic design skills, drawing on a pen tablet with a screen is a good option.

I prefer Canva and recommend it because of the pre-made templates it offers. Whether you want to design Instagram stories, Facebook posts, or cover, there is a pre-made template for it.

Take a look at the screenshot below: Source: Canva

Keep Your Brand In Mind

Creating your brand in the minds of your audience begins with embedding it in your social media graphics. Whether it's a logo, slogan, or any other trademark associated with your brand, include it in your design.

That's the only way your target audience can recognize you anytime. It also helps to spread the word when your audience shares it with their friends. Even social media algorithms tend to boost the reach of branded graphics especially when a lot of users engage them.

Take a look at this graphic Semrush shared on Twitter showing how SEO Audit Workflow should be:

Source: Semrush

You can see its logo at the top and bottom, and how its brand color of light purple and orange were used in the design. That's branding. Anyone that views that graphics will immediately know that it's from Semrush.

Use Text At Minimal

A picture is worth a thousand words. Keep your text minimal and use more visuals that capture people's attention. If you have an image that summarizes 200 words, use it.

That makes the difference between a post and graphics. Even when you use texts, be creative, so they don't look dull. Every graphic design tool offers a font style, size, and color for text. Some even have the option to create artistic or animated texts.

Like this on Canva: Source: Canva

Think of how you can blend things to make your texts stand out and complement the images on the design you use for social media promotion.

Be Intentional With Colors

Colors add flavor to your design, and they entice your audience to engage your graphics on social media. They also act as indicators that help guide an audience to take a desired action. So you should choose them carefully to avoid creating confusion.

Let's assume that someone is selling a fake product that looks like yours which is original. And you want to educate your audience using a graphics design. Red color should be used to indicate the fake product while green should be used to indicate the genuine.

Same is true when you want to use graphics to demonstrate the pros and cons of using a product. Pros should be indicated in green color while cons should be indicated in red color.

In graphics design, red often signifies danger or failure while green signifies life and safety.

Create Reusable Templates

Creating beautiful graphics for social media marketing takes time, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, create reusable templates and save them. That way you can always use them for subsequent designs.

Let's say you designed a graphic to offer a 20% discount on your product to your TikTok audience during Halloween. You can save the template as reusable and use it during the next Halloween to also offer discounts.

Of course, you may want to make changes to suit the moment, but you can't compare it to starting from scratch. This is a breeze if you do your graphic design on Canva because it supports the creation of reusable templates.

Be Trendy

Trends happen on social media, and you should be on the lookout to identify one to include in your graphics. It's a strategy to flow along with your audience and in the process have them take action that can lead to sales.

Let's say that a type of print-on-demand t-shirt is trending on Instagram and you run a print-on-demand store. You can quickly create Instagram graphics of you on the same t-shirt that's trending. That's a cool way of flowing along with the IG audience while asking them to patronize you.

Add Icons

You can use icons and symbols to send simple but powerful messages to your audience. They draw and retain attention, and you can use them for illustration in an infographic. Adding them to your social media graphics not only creates a great user experience but also allows your audience to connect to the concept you are trying to portray. You can find plenty of them on Canva or Freepik.

Source: Freepik

Include Interesting Data

If your brand has impressive data that you think will interest your audience, include it in your social media graphics. People are moved to take action when they see milestones you have achieved especially when it has to do with your products and services.

Let's assume you have an analysis of how you sold 1000 units of your product on Facebook in 3 days. You can use a free tool like Canva to design a chart that's digestible and also appealing. Then include it in your graphics and share it on Facebook.

Your audience who see it will:

• Be convinced that such a product must be valuable for you to have sold many units in a few days

• Be eager to give it a try if it's something that can solve their problem

• Share it with their friends and fans on social media and that gives you more exposure

  Optimize Images

Your social media graphics won't get the much-needed visibility if it isn't optimized. That rubs off the effort you have put to design it. Think of optimization even before you start designing your graphics. Whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok, there is a suitable size for images.

Source: Canva

Graphics design tools like Freepik and Canva have optimized templates for most of the social media graphics you would design.

So keep to it to avoid having your graphics look awkward on feed. Even if you don't use pre-made templates, set your canvas to a suitable ratio. There are also cases where you may put alternative text ( Alt text) to help algorithms understand what your graphics is all about.

Hire A Graphics Designer

There are social media graphics you can't design even if you use the easiest graphics tool. In this case, hiring the services of a graphics designer is your best bet.

It's better to pay a few bucks to have appealing graphics than come up with something that will turn off your audience. Remember it's social media marketing and every option to get things right must be on the cart.

Monitor Engagement

Engagement will tell if your graphics resonate with your social media audience. Likes, retweets, comments, reposts, shares and click-through rate if you run ads are social media engagements you should monitor when you share graphics with your audience.

They are indicators your graphics are well received and can make your target audience take action. While each of the social media platforms has an analytics feature you can use to track and monitor engagement, they don't provide more details like social media management tools.

Final thought on design graphics for social media marketing

Graphics play an important role in social media marketing, and it requires you to give it your best when designing one. People on social media are moved by what they see. This impacts how they react to products and services they think can solve their problems.

I have shown you different tips you can use to improve your graphic design for social media marketing. Starting from knowing your audience to monitoring engagement, these are tips successful brands implement to keep winning on social media with graphics.