Establishing credibility with your audience requires mastering a visual approach for social media. Here are 19 pointers to get you started on the right foot.

In order to provide a genuine experience for users and a profitable return for customers, it is crucial to perfect a visual strategy for social media.

Even if Instagram and Snapchat are more visual than Facebook or Twitter, it is still crucial to take into account every component on every site, including the content of a post, when developing an effective visual strategy for social media.

My expertise in managing the social media accounts of huge businesses like Spirit Airlines and in implementing social media procedures for small, boutique firms has informed the following advice on building visual strategy.

1. The First Grouping of Content

Establishing your categories ahead of time is crucial for developing an effective visual approach.

There are many practical applications for categorization.

They facilitate coordination and guarantee a range of topics are covered; social media days are fun, but not every update needs to be an homage to avocados.

You can make your feed more interesting to look at and easier to navigate using categories.

Pre-selecting content categories is a seemingly easy, yet critical step in ensuring the customer thinks their brand is still producing revenue and visibility.

2. Use few and clear categories

The most common problem I see when engaged to help with agencies on their social media processes is strategies with a dozen or more subcategories.

Assuming a frequency of between three and five times a week per platform, it would be impossible to post to all twelve categories more frequently than twice a month.

There will be a lack of variety in your content calendar, and your strategists and creative directors will be left scratching their heads.

Social media posts require as much time and thought as a traditional advertising, as one of my favourite former creative directors put it. It’s the equivalent of releasing 30 separate commercials simultaneously.

It’s possible for your content to get stale, with no fault of the creative team, if the proper processes are not in place, and creative fatigue is a huge antagonist to social ideation since the deliverable burden for social clients is so large.

3. The Methodology Is Crucial

No of the size of your organisation, having a system in place to develop and manage your visual strategy is essential.

The process frees your mind to pick or create the most effective visuals.

Ultimately, the process will be set by the client’s scope, and you may simplify your own procedures in accordance with that. However, you are welcome to use my approach if you’d like.

4. Content Ideation

Collaboratively imagining the material for each grouping of categories might boost your visual strategy.

You have effectively structured your company to produce solely “thumb-stopping” material.

5. Inclusive Planning and Construction

I’ve worked on a lot of different beauty brands over the past few years, and I can tell you that creating visual strategies that are welcoming to all people has never been more crucial.

Brands that fail to reflect the diversity of our society in their marketing materials and social media profiles will be left behind and fail to engage customers with a genuine product or service.

6. Size Does Count

The vast majority of businesses are not publishing in the proper sizes that the platform demands, which has a significant detrimental impact on the mobile experience of users and the beauty of the posts itself.

Following the appropriate proportions for each platform is a relatively easy requirement that will make your content stand out.

The user experience suffers if you share material that is the same size on all platforms.

7. Specialised Material

While scale is a consideration, you should still avoid sharing the same content on all of your channels on the same day.

It’s crucial that while developing our visual strategy, we keep in mind that users visit various platforms for a variety of reasons.

8. Classified Therapies

Using a type treatment as part of your aesthetic strategy is a novel approach to sprucing up your feeds.

Multiple versions of the same sort of post using varied pictures and wording can increase exposure and make your social feed easier to navigate and more easily recognisable.

9. Care for Accents

Accent treatments, like type treatments, are an important aspect of a brand’s visual design since they assist preserve continuity and familiarity with the brand.

Many companies still think it’s a good idea to superimpose their logo on top of a photo on social media, but switching to an accent treatment is a much better strategy.

10. Condensed Style Manuals

Because the content is a component of the visual user experience, it is important to determine the voice and tone for social postings, which in turn helps elevate a brand’s entire visual strategy.

These aren’t full-blown, traditional style guides; they may take up as little as one page of a deck or process document; but they help you apply a consistent style and tone across your whole visual approach.

11. UGC

An effective visual strategy for social media must include user-generated material.

There are numerous strategic considerations that go into acquiring UGC, and that topic deserves its own post, but the sooner your business can make use of UGC, the more emotionally invested your audience will become in your brand, product, or service.

12. Use System Functions

Client engagement and satisfaction may be improved by making use of the platform’s built-in functionalities.

These posts grab attention visually and get results. Native post features, especially on Twitter and Facebook, are geared at encouraging user interaction.

Conclusion

If you stick to these rules, your #blessed social media visual strategy is guaranteed.