How Visual Design can Enhance Social Media Campaigns

June 1st 2014 | By Steve Grant

The aim of social media is to build an engaging relationship with your audience. However, what many businesses are failing to recognise, is that this relationship can be enhanced by promoting familiarity and recognition through branding.

By using colour and fonts consistently, social media followers come to recognise a brand faster and in turn, content becomes more memorable to them. Here’s how it works.

Colours

A strong colour palette is crucial in gaining brand recognition with followers. Coca Cola’s strong brand colours of red and white are instantly recognisable and give a sense of authority. T-Mobile uses pink to portray a playful and innovative culture. Similarly, Barclays consistently use the same colour of blue with white throughout all their imagery which conveys trust and conviction.

Fonts

Fonts should reflect the brand’s personality. Flirty fonts, friendly fonts, serious fonts, authoritative fonts: there is something to suit every brand character. They need to be applied consistently throughout and varied as little as possible so as not to distract or confuse followers.

Image Filters

Images posted on social media channels need to have a uniform feel. A filter which fits the brand’s personality, culture and message can help images stand out in a busy news feed.

Think about what your images are trying to convey: for example, do you want them to look cool and edgy, colourful and bright or wistful and hazy?

Fashion retailer Zara used a classy black and white filter to show high contrast portraits in their 2013 autumn/winter campaign through which they delivered memorable, sophisticated urban look.

Templates

Using a similar template which incorporates the designated colour, font and filters can really enforce your brand and message. Oreo demonstrated this very well in 2012 when they updated their Facebook page with a new image each day for 100 days. Each post not only used the brand’s colour palette and font, date, title and logo, but used a creatively worked image of the Oreo biscuit to represent something for that day, for example an intricately carved image of the globe. The consistency of all the elements used together immediately made this campaign recognisable and memorable.

Engage Your Audience With Recognisable Campaigns

It’s possible to increase audience relationships across social media by making a brand more recognisable your campaigns more engaging by paying heed to a few key design tools. Get your colours, fonts, filters and templates working consistently and your campaigns will become more memorable making your brand stand out.

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