How to Create Social Graphics That Engage & Inspire Your Audience

In the era of shortened attention spans and pervasive social media, you’ll be hard-pressed to make your post or page stand out from the crowd. The reality is that most social media users are on-the-go and have very short attention spans. They’re more likely to “skim” headlines and skip past longer pieces of content.

So it’s up to you to make interesting content in as few words as possible. As social media marketers, we use images to convey important messages about our brands. Why?

Because we know images can improve engagement and generate more traffic to our sites. Quick and clever images can be an effective way to use social media graphics to engage with your audience.

Our guide on how to create social graphics that engage and inspire your audience will show you how you can use simple yet visually appealing graphics to engage your audience, build a bigger social presence, and increase traffic to your blog or small business website today. Let’s get started. 

Define Your Audience and Set Goals

• • Building your social media plan starts with defining your target audience, as well as setting goals for your social activity. This is an area where you may want to enlist the help of your marketing team, who can assist in creating personas and buyer journey maps that will give you a comprehensive picture of who you’re trying to reach, how best to communicate with them, and what potential messaging could resonate.
  • What does your audience want out of social graphics? Do they want an aesthetically pleasing picture or a behind-the-scenes look at your business? Do they want a quick, shareable graphic that creates value or do they want something more down-to-earth?
  • Focusing on your audience will keep your social graphics on task to accomplish your goal- which is to grow your social media presence or increase your website traffic. 

Research Your Competitors 

• • Now that you have an idea of what your audience will want to see and how it will impact your goals, let’s look at the next step: research your competitors. What are they posting?
  • What social graphics are appealing and performing well on their social media posts? What doesn’t perform well? What kinds of things are they posting?
  • Now, the idea is not to directly copy your competitors, but to get a sense of where they are. You can learn a lot about what they focus on, since you’re looking to draw from the same demographic audience. Take some notes about what social graphics perform the best and why you think it was successful. Remember: learn from them, but don’t steal their ideas. 

Use Rule of Thirds

• • Now that we have established our audience and goals, and researched the competition, it’s time to create the social graphics! This is the fun part. But if you’re not naturally creative at putting together graphics, don’t worry! We’ll let you in on our little secret: the rule of thirds.
  • The rule of thirds is a composition guideline that places your subject in the left or right third of an image, leaving the other two thirds more open. Not only is this easier to look at, but it also captures the attention of your audience better. So make sure all the images you’re posting use the rule of thirds.

Utilize Quick Values

• • If you’re stuck on ideas of what social graphics to share, think about utilizing quick values. Quick values are shareable infographics that your audience can easily consume and share with their own social circle. This increases your reach as well. Social media is a visual medium.
  • That’s why creating graphics for social media should be a top priority. But it can be challenging to create images that convey your message effectively, especially if you don’t have a graphic design background. Use an image editing tool like Canva or PicMonkey to make your images look more professional and eye-catching without needing advanced design skills or expensive software programs like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. 

Use High-Quality Images

• • The purpose of social media is to engage with your audience, so it’s important to use high-quality images and text in your graphics. You want the image itself to be compelling, but you also want your text to be engaging and written in a voice that’s true to your brand. If you have too many elements or need more than one piece of content, consider breaking it up into multiple posts instead of trying to cram everything into one graphic.
  • Even if your graphic has an interesting concept or theme behind it, it needs to be clear enough that people can understand its meaning without having any context or information about what else is going on in the post itself. That means choosing images that are simple or have obvious symbolism (like hearts) rather than ones with a lot of detail or color variation.
  •  Also make sure you include an eye-catching call-to-action at the end of each post so people know what they should do next.