Every brand has a personality of its own. Each brand communicates its personality and more subtle messages through visual cues. Visuals have become a dominant aspect of social media strategies and marketing strategies. In this article, you’ll see seven visual content creation tips & guide to start using now.
However, many individuals and brands struggle with creating consistent good quality visual content on top of text-based blogs. Writing blogs in itself becomes too arduous. On top of that, creating and curating visual content for multiple social media platforms is a struggle in itself.
However, there are a few simple tools and tricks which you can use to create good quality visual content and maintain consistency for your cross-platform social media handles.
Table of contents
- Why is visual content so important?
- 1. Create a consistent visual theme for your brand
- 2. Reformat your images and videos for different platforms
- 3. Compress your images: Visual Content Creation Tips & Guide
- 4. Keep an appropriate visual, text, and white space ratio
- 5. Invest in good video editing software
- 6. Use Alt Tags: Visual Content Creation Tips
- 7. Check usage rights
- Conclusion Visual Content Creation Tips
Why is visual content so important?
Studies suggest our brain process images 60,000 times faster than text. Marketers have repeatedly observed that posts with images and videos receive more engagement in likes, comments, and shares than simple text posts. Last year, videos comprised 69% of content floated on the internet and generated enormous traffic for websites.
Most marketers claim that videos help them generate more leads, boost traffic on-site, increase overall sales, and establish brand identity more firmly.
This article will explore some exciting tips that you can use right away to improve your visual content and make the process effortless.
1. Create a consistent visual theme for your brand
You must have a consistent visual theme going for your various social media handles and their respective posts. Inconsistency in your visual theme will break the regularity and weaken the brand identification. Your visual theme can be kept consistent by using these three things:
- Logo
- Color palette
- Fonts
Ensure that every post you roll out on your social has a consistent color palette that is in line with your brand’s color scheme. This helps audiences identify your content over others just by your color scheme.
You can see that Nike uses a similar color scheme, font type, and logo across its social. The images are references from Nike’s website and youtube channel. As a result, a great visual content creation guide, idea.
Mark your images, videos, infographics, and other visual content with your logo. You can subtly push your logo on the sides and corners of the post. Keep your fonts consistent for all your content. The use of CDNs can also help in reducing the loading time. There are numerous CDNs available. You just need to compare the best CDNs to find the best option for your needs.
2. Reformat your images and videos for different platforms
Each social media platform has its own specific dimensions for its posts, profile photos, banners, etc. Don’t be lazy and clumsy to use one image across your social media channels. Take out some time and put in the extra effort to correctly reform your pictures and videos for different platforms.
Here are a few dimensions for basic profile posts for popular social media platforms in standard form: width x height (in pixels)
- Facebook: 180 x 180 (displays 170 x 170 on desktop)
- Twitter: 440 x 220 (minimum)
- Instagram: 161 x 161 (for photo thumbnails)
- Pinterest: 236-pixel width for the main page and board (height is scaled accordingly)
- LinkedIn: 1104 x 736
- YouTube: 1280 x 720
Sprouts Social and Canva are great tools that let you resize and create your images fit for various social media platforms. There are also a variety of video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro which you can use to edit your videos for social media use.
3. Compress your images: Visual Content Creation Tips & Guide
Many bloggers and website owners are unaware of the toll heavy images take on your website’s load speed. You must have come across pages where the text has loaded, but the picture takes too long to load and sometimes does not even load. Here you have failed your visual content.
Visual content can be engaging, but it can also slow down your website. Thus, it is essential to upload compressed images with optimized size. By compressing your image, you shred some weight off your image, which helps it load faster.
You can use the following tools to compress your JPEGs and PNGs for free:
- Firstly, CompressJPEG
- Secondly, CompressPNG
This image lost 86% of its weight, from 1.8 MB to 248 KB for your visual content creation & guide.
4. Keep an appropriate visual, text, and white space ratio
Pictures with many texts are skipped mainly by people and do not appeal immediately to the audience. No one likes an image with too much text. Similarly, sometimes just visuals without relevant text can miss their mark.
Especially for infographics, you must maintain a visual-to-text and white space ratio. White space is the blank space in any picture. It is best to use 50:20:30 visual to text to the white space ratio.
Keeping an appropriate amount of blank space in your infographics is crucial as it makes the graphic look clean, aligned, and easy to read and understand.
5. Invest in good video editing software
Most people try to edit their videos with their operating systems’ default software. If you have edited even a single video in your life, you would know the limitations and shallowness of this default software. Free movie makers online also come with similar kinds of constraints.
If you want to roll out crisp, fun, and high-quality videos with amazing edits, then you better invest in good editing software. Final cut pro, Premiere Pro, Wondershare, Adobe AfterEffects are some of the best editing software out there. Once your videos are post-produced in these, you will never go back to any default movie maker.
6. Use Alt Tags: Visual Content Creation Tips
Search Engines cannot view an image as humans do. In addition, search engines require some text to go through an image. Your alt tag helps search engine bots see your visual content.
Using Alt Tags greatly boosts your SEO. Not only your SEO, but it also is useful for people with impaired vision. The screen readers tell them about the image by reading your Alt tag.
Enhancing your visual content to this scope will make it relevant for your audience with low vision or impairments. so, alt Tags come by default with website builders like WordPress, where you can add the text in your media library by clicking on the required image.
7. Check usage rights
Today it is elementary to find stunning visuals or beautiful static images on the internet, which you can use. Moreover, professional photographers, videographers, amateurs, and hobbyists upload these images on various marketplaces and websites like iStock, Shutterstock, Unsplash, Pexels, etc.
Before using any image from these websites, always check for copyright and usage rights for these stock videos and pictures. There are many royalty-free stock images and many of which need to be bought with copyright and licensing.
You should use either royalty-free stock or buy the visuals to avoid any trouble in the future.
Conclusion Visual Content Creation Tips
The importance of visuals on your social media strategy cannot be undermined. So, Visual content is shaping the way customers engage with a brand and make their decisions. Instead of clumsily strutting your way through, give proper time and energy in creating the right kind of visual content.
Many more tips can make your visual content more engaging, but for now, this is a great place to begin with!
Use these tips immediately and come back for more tips for engaging visual content.