Social media can be a bit of a wasteland for brands unless a company actually stands out. If you’ve worked hard to create a brand that does a lot of good, and genuinely has its own voice, it can be dispiriting to find that your social media accounts seem soulless and flat.
There is a way to approach changing this. A few factors can really help to ratchet up the visual impact of your branding on social media.
In this post, we will dig down into a couple of techniques and considerations you should have in mind. Often, it’s just about how a few things look. Including, even in this age, fonts.
Fonts
Twitter is a great place to find an audience quickly on. It has one of the very best search facilities around, and it ranks pretty highly when compared to other social media platforms. This is because of that simple search option.
Every brand likes to be quirky or different, and it is often the case that a brand’s personality is one of the key aspects of its success. Sure, everyone looks to Apple for lessons in branding, but the huge company has a definite feel to it that other brands can’t replicate. It’s slightly geeky but also incredibly cool. Professional, but laid-back. It’s a tough image to beat and has resulted in billions in sales.
But take a look at Apple’s font, and for some reason, that font just works. It conveys that geeky but relaxed air that the brand has created and nurtured for decades. The font speaks Apple. And while we’re talking about fonts, any brand can learn from this giant.
With so much room to move in the design of your social media profiles, it is well worth considering different fonts that are attractive and perfect for conveying your brand’s image. Of course, you will have different fonts for different aspects of your profile, but choose a couple that speak your brand (solidity, dependability etc.) and stick to them throughout all of your profiles. Having this consistent look across your channels will boost your brand’s profile by bringing about a recognisable feel.
Play around with the fonts that you have access to, and see if you can build in some consistency. This tweaking of the visual impact of your brand on social can work miracles with the trust your company generates, and the engagement.
You will obviously be able to design your own signature font as part of your own design process in branding. This will be used throughout your social media channels and your other platforms, such as email marketing, as well as in the work you do on your website.
The colour thing
Here is a great little trick that can move mountains when it comes to engagement. It takes a while to get right and could involve multiple posts and plenty of tweaking, so don’t expect results tomorrow. But work with colours. It helps.
Think about the colour that best communicates the feelings your brand is trying to create, Warmth and passion have their colours. Professionalism and expertise have theirs too.
Let’s talk about the colour red for example. As you might imagine, red is the colour of passion and excitement. If you’re a professional, city-based accountancy firm, this is probably not the colour you want to use in your Facebook posts. But if you’re a dating agency, while it may seem a little obvious to have hearts and roses everywhere, your social media posts will benefit from regular injections of the colour. It conveys the feel that your brand is aiming to bring to the lives of customers. You’re not bringing them boredom. You’re aiming for romance. Red makes perfect sense.
So you use red (as a dating specialist) in your photos. You create a tweet about a contest you have coming up, and the name of the contest is written in red. Your logo will obviously contain some red in it, and the imagery in the tweet will contain a dash of red too. By doing this you have brought about an instant recognition of you and your message as a brand, and some quality branding too.
Build this engagement through colour by making your posting across networks the same when it comes to palette choices. The brand that uses the same colours everywhere it posts is the brand that develops a consistency and reliability that makes it worth engaging with.
There is plenty of work to be done here (creating photos that are different across networks but still have the same hue can be challenging), but the payoff means that you will be trusted as a consistent, professional presence. And you may even come across as having a personality.
The pictures themselves
You’re obviously using pictures and photos in the majority of your posts because this isn’t 2007. But are you using the same kind of quality control that you were when you started out? If you’re using stock photos, go for the very best in the business, or at least the very best you can afford. If you’re using your own images every now and then, that quality control needs to be very evident.
You can recover if you’ve had a bad start. We’re not trying to blow our own trumpet here too much, but if you take a look at Locowise and how its posts are all carrying that exact same visual style across the board, it’s easy to see how just a few weeks of consistency in visuals can bring results.
Don’t be disheartened if you’ve started badly and your posts have erratic work in visuals. Grab the opportunity to find a good stock image company, develop those fonts and work hard on making sure your colour scheme screams your brand.
With a little work and a real focus, you can start using your visual elements to boost engagement.
Want some great data on engagement and reach? How about a two week trial of Locowise, all completely free? Release your metrics magic today, and do it for free.
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