Images for social media

We were recently asked to design a series of images for social media, helping one of our clients promote their school holiday activities.

But instead of going through the typical details of this project, I’m actually going to use it to explain what’s important as far as your brand image on social media is concerned.

Social media is very easy to use, especially for those of us who use it every day for both personal and business use. In some ways, it’s almost too easy to share things on there – whether articles, experiences, comments or images – and with brands, I see a variety of things happen:

• a collection of beautiful, carefully-curated images, but not always directly related to the business
• a storyboard of day-to-day images from both the business and personal experiences
• quotes – both branded/styled consistently, and a mash-up of various styles
• various other images that don’t match the brand

While it’s easy to get carried away on social media – whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, even LinkedIn – thinking about how your brand looks on any platform is just as important as every brochure, flyer, business card or advertisement looks. Spending the time to make sure your branding and style on social media is consistent might seem a bit silly at first, but when you end up creating a style that people can recognise by a glance of a photo, then your branding is doing what it should – creating brand recognition.

Our client had a somewhat consistent brand image on social media – the foundations were there, but more could be done. So we developed a consistent kid-friendly style of illustration, and chose one font to use across all images. This created a style that is meaningful to our client, easy to recognise for their customers, and builds a template to work from for future images.

A consistent brand image on social media isn’t just good for brand recognition – it also speeds up the time needed to come up with new images each time, having a visual template to work from. And any time that is saved running a business can always be invested in other tasks (or getting a chance to stop and enjoy your coffee while it’s still hot!).