A viral social media campaign is a marketer’s dream! The audience on social media tends to make decisions within a matter of seconds thus making any content go viral instantly. People retain information provided to them via visuals for up to 65% for until three consecutive days. Relevant images utilised to design content for social media can be highly beneficial for businesses to make things go viral or at least leave a long-lasting impact. To create viral graphics for social media it is necessary to first understand the importance of visuals to boost brand awareness and later enable conversions.
How Important are visual graphics?
Online
promotion of businesses via visual graphics has become an integral part of
marketing. This requires an innovative and creative approach to design
customised visuals for aligning customer journey with business growth and sales
online. Visual graphics cannot just improve conversions but can easily
establish goodwill among users and followers online. A well-designed visual can
easily attracted masses and spread out the brand message in less time than
usual. Moreover, not just viral graphics for social media but a company without
solid designs cannot play well in the marketplace. This means that a business
needs to create its identity and brand image to move in the market at a
competitive pace with an edge over others.
In simpler words, visual graphics strengthen your brand not just in the marketplace but also in the minds of the users.
The
important question remains unanswered; how to create viral graphics for social
media? Here is all that you need to know…
1. Solid and Consistent Typefaces
Are A Must
Graphical
elements, colours and fonts need to be consistent and must align with the brand
image. A brand for women might look wonderful with graphics carrying a nice
hand-written or a light italic font but this won’t fit for a construction-related
business.
Be
very careful while choosing fonts for your brand. Beginning from the basics,
you need to understand the differences between Serif and San Serif font
families so that you pick the right area to experiment. No matter what font
family you choose, you need to stick to it every time while designing
something. You may experiment a bit here and there but only if you are a pro at
graphic designing and understand what style fits where.
No wonder social media is all about breaking rules and designers today experiment a lot, but not everything works for everyone, right?
The
key is simple and easy, just make sure that whatever the font style you choose,
it stands out over the image being used. The text must be readable!
2. Get Creative with Apps
To
thrive your brand on social media with viral graphics, you need to experiment a
lot and think out of the box to create visuals. Today, with evolution and
innovation of software and designing tools, designers are introduced to multiple
other options other than just the traditional Photoshop. Some of the common
apps being widely used are Pixlr, Canva and Lightroom that have enabled regular
people to experiment with their creative side.
Apps
might sound handy in terms of operating but Adobe offers a set of remarkable designing
software that bring out the best visuals for your brand.
3. Image Sizing and
Guidelines
When
experimenting with graphics and multiple social media platforms, do not forget
about the variation of image support sizes that each has to offer. You may be
interested in using templates and vector elements for creating the graphic of
your choice but remember to resize them according to the social media
platforms. The best idea is to design different variants of a single design that
are compatible with various social media platforms.
Multiple
platforms support a 1:1 image size for in-stream sharing but sizes differ when
it comes to a cover photo or profile display. And mind you, these two visuals
play a very important role in putting forward a great first impression of your
brand. To make it easy for you, here is a guide that you need to master:
Twitter:
Header Photo: 1500 x 500 pixels
Profile Photo: 400 x 400 pixels
Facebook:
Cover Photo for Desktop: 820 x 312 pixels
Cover Photo for Mobile: 640 x 360 pixels
Profile Photo: 360 x 360 pixels
Pinterest:
Board Display: 222 x 150 pixels
Pin Size (Portrait): 735 x 1102 pixels
Profile Photo: 165 x 165 pixels
Instagram:
Photo Size: 640 x 640 pixels
Thumbnail: 161 x 161 pixels
Profile Photo: 110 x 110 pixels
Google
Plus:
Cover Photo: 1080 x 608 pixels
Profile Photo: 250 x 250 pixels
These
are all the good to learn basics so that you do not mess up with your social
media profiles or the viral graphics being designed.
4. Apply A Story Telling
Strategy
What
content enjoys most resharing? Always the one which people can relate to. This
is the key to master the art of creating viral graphics for social media. Try
to inform your users about your brand in a creative way. Let them know how your
brand came into being and what ideology does it hold. This can also greatly
help you set a mood online, which means your followers will be able to guess
the type of brand you are putting forward.
Use the right images to which your audience can easily relate to and reshare visuals accordingly. Another great way of achieving this is by creating graphics that carry evergreen useful information for people to remember and relate to in the longer run. By informing people using visuals, you can mark your presence in their minds for a longer period than just using textual content.
5. Right Audience
By
just creating innovative visuals and sharing them randomly will lead you nowhere.
The content will pass on and on in directions where your potentials may never
be waiting for. The goal is to identify your audience before jumping onto the
sharing stage. This is done to make sure that your visuals reach out to the
right segment of the social media users and not just everyone. Once that it
goes viral, the boundaries automatically fade away but initially, every content
needs to be aligned with the audience’s interest.
A
women’s clothing brand will only want women to see its colourful summer
collection graphics and that too of a certain age group. This is when they require
to identify their target audience and create viral graphics that satisfy their
need and the thought process.
6. Build A Connection
Whatever
people see, hear or read develops a mood and strikes their emotional chords. Your
created visuals will also have an impact on people’s mind and what they think
about your brand.
Just as Coca Cola visuals always lighten up the mood with a happy and blissful emotion that they trigger in the viewer’s minds.
Similarly, whatever you choose to create with your brand, will influence social media user’s behaviours towards it. Coca Cola always targets people with a family-oriented, celebration-based approach and that too aligning with various seasons and festivals to trigger the right emotion.
You
need to try this out as well, only a visual that helps the audience connect to
it can go viral among masses.
7. User-Generated Content
With
a lot of margins to experiment with visuals, social media also provides brands
with unwanted feedback. But valuable positive feedback can be effectively
incorporated in a visual to put forward the brand’s brighter image. User-generated
content owned by a brand can be very motivating for people, this way
influencers and bloggers automatically show interest in the brand to get
recognised online.
The
movie ‘Straight Outta of Compton’ went viral with its meme template allowing so
many social media users using it to fulfil their need. The marketers took great
advantage of user-generated content in this case.
Summing it all up, visuals are now an important part of your brand and its marketing plan online. Do not compromise on the quality of the content being created if you want to go viral! Just master the art of targeting social media users with the type of content they want to see and the visuals that content well. Images, infographics, subliminal messages and whatnot, all can do wonders if created as well-designed graphics. We know how it is done, get in touch today to get customised social media strategies with quality content to boost your brand conversions and hit the right return on investment threshold.
0 Comments