For businesses using social media as one of their main marketing channels, it is important to create a social media aesthetic that aligns across all platforms. Use these five tips to start your adventure into the social media realm.
Social media allows brands to connect with their customers across multiple channels.
Nearly 97% of Fortune 500 companies use at least one social media platform to promote their brand and establish positive communication and rapport with their customers.
With over 3 billion social media users all over the world, small businesses need to leverage the power of social media by using it as an area for growth.
A powerful social media aesthetic makes your brand more recognizable and distinguishable from competitors.
Demonstrating a cohesive social media style can add to your business and its success as it grows over time.
Invest in your social media aesthetic by hiring a social media marketing agency.
How to Create a Social Media Aesthetic
- Understand Your Business Persona
- Seek Style Inspiration
- Choose a Color Palette
- Build a Toolkit for Resources
- Update Your Style Guide Accordingly
1. Understand Your Business Persona
A company’s social media aesthetic stems from their brand identity. In order to establish an effective social media aesthetic, companies should look at their company’s background.
What is your brand’s personality? Do you convey a certain tone? What are your company’s values? Who is your target audience?
These questions should be easy to answer and should even be shown through the marketing materials your company already has.
Take elements from existing external marketing and website materials that can drive your new social media aesthetic.
Along with looking at your business’s persona, it is also important to look at your target audience.
Learn from your social media followers to see what they like. Are they impressed with your snappy tweets or are they drawn to longer forms of content?
Tools like SproutSocial leverage audience attention through gaining insights that can help inform a brand and business strategy.
These tools can help businesses learn about their target demographics, see what posts stand out, and measure which posts and channels are receiving the most traffic.
Using that information about your customers and overall business as a base can get your company started with an initial plan.
2. Seek Style Inspiration
A lot of companies look to competitors to see how they’re performing, how they’re targeting their customers, and what strategies they’re using.
To form an effective social media aesthetic, businesses can look to some of their favorite brands to mirror their look and gain inspiration.
We don’t encourage businesses to steal from other brands, but this strategy is a good way to gain insight into what you like and don’t like.
Take a look at magazines, multi-channel communication outlets, and of course, social media channels to get an idea of what grabs your attention.
If your company wants to play around with color types, look to fashion brands like Zara for inspiration.
Throughout their Instagram page, Zara uses different visuals to promote their fashion lines, relying on different color palettes and imagery that fit each collection.
Make note of these accounts to see what stands out to you. It is also important to look at what you think works well.
Is it the color? The text? Image type?
All of these insights can be translated to fit your social media aesthetic.
3. Choose a Color Palette
The use of color is extremely important. Consumers tend to reference color when thinking about different brands. Colors are also associated with certain feelings and moods.
For example, green conveys the message of health and growth, while blue establishes trust and reliability.
Along with selecting a color that fits your social media’s messaging, it is important to think about colors you might want to avoid.
Colors like yellow and orange can exhibit alarm and feelings of unease, but can be used as accented colors sparingly.
Once you have a color palette picked out for your social media aesthetic, brainstorm different ways you can incorporate it within your digital content strategy.
Do you plan to only post photos with those colors? Or does your strategy rely more on text or other visual elements?
Consider tactics that align with your cohesiveness and fit consumer expectations.
4. Build a Toolkit for Resources
Once everything has been decided for your social media aesthetic, it is important to find a central location to fit all of the plans and interactive elements. This is particularly important if you’re working across teams.
Create a style toolkit that allows you and your employees to access any brand elements or templates for posting.
You can also keep a folder that includes all brand guidelines and a social media calendar.
A social media calendar can be a resource that keeps your team directly involved in the strategy aspect of your aesthetic.
It should contain the amount of postings, type of content, and other needed information for each social media channel of your business.
With all of these in one place, it will be easier for your company to follow along with the new social media aesthetic you’re trying to establish.
5. Update Your Style Guide Accordingly
With an updated social media aesthetic, it might be time to look back at your overall brand style guidelines again.
While brainstorming an initial social media aesthetic, your team might’ve noticed some outdated guidelines from branding efforts in the past.
Take the time to organize and update those to fit more in alignment with your social media aesthetic and guidelines.
Ensuring that there is alignment between these areas can only benefit your company’s overall brand presence to customers.
Maintain a Consistent Social Media Aesthetic for Your Brand
Creating a structured and cohesive social media aesthetic can be a challenge for small businesses just starting out. However, establishing a social media aesthetic helps keep everything aligned, which creates a stronger presence for your company in the long run.