5 Pro Tips for Creating Eye-Catching Social Media Graphics

Introduction

Almost 60% of the world’s population and more than 92% of the total internet users visit social media platforms every day. Therefore, it has been one of the best choices for marketers to draw the attention of a very large audience easily through social media marketing.

However, the process is not as simple as it seems for luring people’s precious attention and getting them to spend their valuable time on your marketing message can be very difficult. So, what’s the solution? — it’s through eye-catching graphics, worthy of the precious time of your target audience. In this blog, I will introduce 5 pro tips that you can leverage to create eye-catching social media graphics that can bring results for your campaign.

What basically are social media graphics

Graphics refer to all the visual elements that can easily catch a viewer’s attention. Social media graphics are the heartbeats of lively online content that stands out, engages the audience, and communicates the inherent message with visual appeal.

Social media graphics include infographics, pictures, videos, and animations, each designed to pop into the busy world of social media. But these are not just pretty pictures, but rather strategic tools to combine art with marketing genius for significant purposes, such as brand visibility, engagement encouragement, and better conversion.

Why should you use eye-catching social media graphics

Boosts Visibility:

Stat: According to Buffer “tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than text-only tweets”.

Visual graphics act like a beacon amidst the clutter of social media feeds. Graphics never fail to capture the reader’s eyeballs instantly and make posts compete against other text-heavy content. This also increases the possibility of the post being clicked instantaneously.

Drives Engagement:

Stat: Posts with images drive 650% more engagement than posts without images.

Beautiful posts drive engagement. Hence, the number of likes, comments, and shares of the posts will be greater if the posts are beautiful. This way, you make your users even more engaged in a lively community around your brand or message and help drive up reach and effect.

Simplifies Message Delivery:

Stat: “People retain 95% of a message when watching a video compared to 10% when they read it in text”.

In the fast lane of social media, graphics become very instrumental in the simplification of the delivery of messages through the distillation of complex ideas into easy and simple visual representations, aiding faster comprehension and retention of your message.

Breaks Language Barrier:

Visuals help break the language barrier, and it becomes easy for people all around the world to understand your point of expression, as they are universally understood and not limited to the confinement of any particular language. It makes your content available to audiences on a global scale.

Promotes Content Sharing:

For instance, the social media algorithm is known for favoring more visual content, such that posts with attractive graphics will receive even more visibility and sharing. In return, higher chances of promoting your brand effectively.

5 Tips for Creating Eye-Catching Social Media Graphics

1. Master Image Composition and Quality:

• Quality in social media graphics depends on the resolution and composition. Hence make sure the images you use are of high resolution for your graphics to look professional and look appealing on all the devices.
• Follow the rule of thirds, which suggests a picture should be divided into thirds both horizontally and vertically, and a subject should be at the point where these lines cross. This creates a visual that is pleasing and attracts the eye of the viewer to some points of the graphic.
• Always follow the given aspect ratio of a specific platform. If an image or video is uploaded without a correct aspect ratio, the image or video automatically gets stretched or cropped. This impacts the overall quality of graphics.

For example, a social media campaign of a fashion brand is launched with a new collection. This has been highly attributed to the use of high-resolution images and making sure that the placing of models conforms to the rule of thirds. The images are uploaded as per the relevant aspect ratio of different platforms.

2. Brand with Precision

• Effective branding using social media graphics goes beyond just slapping a logo onto an image. Prioritize a strategic use of brand colors, fonts, and style to convey the brand’s message and personality. This not only enhances brand recognition but also ensures consistency across all marketing materials.
• Keep repeating a visual element, like a specific color or shape, while designing your social media graphics to make every graphic a demonstration of your brand.
• Align relevant visual elements on the canvas with precision instead of tying them up together forcefully.

For example,

On the other hand, an artisanal bread bakery may decide to use warm, rustic, hand-drawn, and typeface colors to be able to convey a sense of home and hand-crafted products. This example illustrates how brand elements are carefully integrated to give a distinctive and memorable visual identity to the media.

3. Ensure Text and Background Harmony:

• Contrast between text and background is important in any social media graphic. Use a higher contrast between the two to enhance legibility. It will help your message come through.
• Use light text on a dark background or vice versa to make the content visually attractive and this easily catches a viewer’s attention.
• Do not obscure any crucial parts of the photo with writing, such as faces, or do not place any text on the complex background of the image. A night event, for instance, should feature a dark, eerie background with very vivid neon text to bring out the energy and vibrancy of the event.
• Use white spaces consciously to separate visual elements from the background design. Viewers can focus on each element individually. White space helps your design elements have balance and harmony. Hence surround key elements with white spaces to grab the viewer’s attention.

For example, a health and wellness brand might use very serene, light backgrounds with very dark green text for things like meditation and relaxation, lending an air of calm and the ability to zone in. Both show how two contrasting colors can relate to the message and tone set forth in the content.

4. Add a Focal Point and Simplify:

• Create a clear focal point within your graphic so the viewer knows exactly what is most important within the graphic: whether that be a product, message, or brand logo. This process of simplifying through the elimination of unnecessary clutter makes sure there is nothing to distract the viewers from getting the intended message. This does not only make your graphics effective but also much more memorable.
• Give intervals in between to make images achieve a balanced and concentrated composition. Keep things simple in the graphics, and less cluttered with a handful of information.

For example, think of a bare-bones ad by a luxury watch brand with just the watch, a clean and uncluttered background, really drawing focus just to the product. The other instance is a high-stakes statistic on conservation by an environmental organization in their campaign graphic, using a few elements of design to ensure the message is at the forefront. They both teach us simplicity and focus that might make social media graphics effective.

5. Use texts consciously:

• Use texts on your social media graphics that are in line with the design. The text and graphics should complement each other.
• Use fonts that communicate the brand message well. Futura is a font that uses clean lines and simple shapes, giving the whole a modern, sleek, and minimalist vibe. On the other hand, Times New Roman uses elegant letters and subtle design elements, giving the whole a trustworthy and formal vibe.

For example, an architectural firm, Pemaspace, in one of their posts used a bright staircase, suspended in mid-air, and the text in Futura font, “SPACE”. Their caption truly said that “we create spaces that inspire”.

FAQs

1. Why do high-quality images matter in social media graphics?

Quality is important because that is the only thing that is going to help you catch the eyes of the viewers towards your stuff and clearly and professionally get your message across. This will ensure the effective delivery of your graphics across devices and, by doing so, your brand gets perceived in a better light; hence, higher possibilities of increased engagement are created. Poor-quality images can detract from your message, making your brand appear unprofessional or careless.

2. How does branding affect the social media graphics?

Branding of the social media graphics makes them uniform, and recognizable and allows the audience to feel emotionally connected. This means that the logical application of colors, fonts, and styles, which reflect your brand and its identity values, make your content recognizably and memorably uniform on all platforms, thus strengthening the internet brand presence.

3. In a social media graphic, what does the contrast between text and its background mean?

In simple terms, the contrast between the text and the background of this text should be huge in social media graphics for easy reading and catching the attention of the reader. Highlighting is a sure way of ensuring that your message pops out for easy reading at first glance. This prevents your message from getting lost through the visually busy backgrounds, making sure that your graphic has as much impact as possible.

4. Why is simplifying social media graphics recommended?

Digital marketers simplify social media graphics so that the audience can focus on the most important elements of attention: the product, message, or logo. It will make such graphics work better by decreasing the number of distractors and, therefore, allowing it to stay longer in memory. Create a clean, focused design that communicates your message across with the least distraction to the viewer, so it increases viewer engagement and retention.

Conclusion

In this age of digital evolution and a stronghold of social media platforms as marketplaces for ideas and products, one really needs to differentiate themselves by means of strategic creativity.

The above tips are meant to empower you at the very core of what social media graphics have to offer, how to turn every scroll into a stop, every glance into an engagement, and every engagement into a potential conversion. Perfect your image composition, and brand with precision, ensure harmony between text and background, add a focus, and be simple.

Doing all these can be overwhelming alongside running a business, a creative agency with their expertise can use the best of the design practices to create eye-catching graphics. Let your social media graphics be the lighthouse in an ocean of digital content that will attract your audience to its shores, with the right strategy or by hiring a professional creative agency.