Seven Ways to Get More Value from Your Social Media Images
Here’s a question – what would social media be without fantastic images?
The answer – painfully bland and boring.
Quality pictures are inherently more impactful and memorable than any combination of words you could ever put together. Hence the reason why they form such an important aspect of a wider social media marketing package.
Still, this doesn’t mean that a series of random images with no specific meaning is going to have a positive impact on your wider campaign. If looking to extract the maximum value from your social media images, there are seven key things you need to focus on:
1. Consistent branding
The single most important thing to ensure is that every image you share is consistent with your wider branding efforts. Colour themes, fonts, styles, tone of voice and the overall ‘feel’ of the image should be 100% you. To such an extent that nobody needs to ask who it was that published the image.
2. Be platform-specific
Just to clarify, this doesn’t mean that you necessarily must create entirely unique images from scratch for every social media platform. Instead, it’s simply a case of making the necessary adjustments to suit both the platforms and the preferences of their respective target audiences.
3. Design principles
When taking and publishing photographs, it’s worth familiarising yourself with a least a few of the most fundamental design principles. How to effectively consider colour, space, contrast, balance, symmetry and so on – all the kinds of things that can add up to extraordinary images.
4. Be mindful with text
Incorporating text within your images can be extremely effective, though needs to be approached mindfully. For example, too much text within any image can be off putting for the vast majority of audiences. Conciseness counts, quotations tend to perform strongly and so does information regarding promotions or specials of any kind.
5. Establish a routine
If you post the same event or advertise the same special offer at the same time every week, repetition can actually be a good thing. Creating a sense of familiarity with your regular customers in particular often works wonders, as opposed to working frantically to create unique imagery and visuals in general each time the ad/promo is featured.
6. Clear CTAs
Without drawing too much attention away from the primary focus of the image, you need to ensure that your CTAs are as clear and accessible as possible. If using imagery to promote anything whatsoever, the easier you can make it for customers to take action, the better.
7. Always relevant
Last but not least, it’s important to focus on the relevance of each and every image you post on any of your chosen social platforms. The reason being that posting or sharing random imagery just because it looks nice can have a marked impact on the consistency and perceived quality of your profile in general. If it doesn’t have at least some kind of relevance to your niche, you might want to leave it out of the equation entirely.