The complete guide to social media design

by Jamahl Johnson  

Full Article 

Fifteen years ago, you may have gotten away with calling social media a fad. But these days, a social media presence is as essential as a telephone number—and a strategic approach to social media design is how you make sure your followers answer the call.

For businesses, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest are excellent spaces to engage directly with the real people who support you. It’s where you create connections with content that entertains your followers while fostering brand awareness. As useful as social media is, it is also highly competitive. Once you publish content, it immediately joins an endless stream of content, where it will compete not only with the content produced by other brands, but also with the platform’s ranking algorithm. In social media, only the strong survive, but the good news is that standout social media graphics are the best tools in your arsenal to create memorable, engaging content.

This ultimate guide to social media design will walk you through the different kinds of social media graphics, how to use them and, most importantly, how to make them matter.

Social media design overview
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• Before you start your social media design

• • Plan your social media design strategy
  • List, brief and schedule your design assets
  • Keep a reference of the content sizes and dimensions for each platform

• Tips on designing your social media page

• • Profile picture design
  • Cover image design
  • Profile page layout design
  • Platform-specific profile branding

• 5 guidelines for social media content design

• • Design content in a way that is useful to your followers
  • Incorporate different types of design into your content
  • Balance individual content with your overall profile page
  • Design themed content and templates
  • Adjust your design based on analytics

Before you start your social media design
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Plan your social media design strategy

The first step in social media design is to create your strategy (or review your existing one). Design should act as an enhancement to your content, facilitating the messages you want to get across, so it’s essential to first create a solid messaging strategy in order to perform well.

1. Evaluate the audiences for your current channels. You may already have already conducted target audience research for your overall brand strategy, but the audience for each social media channel will represent a specific segment or cross-section of your larger audience. In order to create the most effective social media design, understand who is currently following your content and what they are looking for. Make sure this is backed by target market research—conduct interviews, surveys, use the platform’s analytics to find demographic information, notate the feedback or comments your followers leave. Next, create user personas for your existing audiences in addition to new audiences you want to reach. Personas are important because it’s much easier to design content for a person than for facts and figures.
2. Choose the best platforms to reach your audiences. Social media is necessary for businesses, but that doesn’t mean every social media platform is necessary for every business. For example, recipes perform notoriously well on Pinterest, so while it makes sense for a food brand to invest heavily in that platform, it won’t be as important for, say, a home security brand. Research your many options for social media platforms, and decide on a few based on what is popular within your industry and with your audience. Assuming that you should only use the most popular platforms may lead you to miss out on social media apps with niche audiences that might be perfect for your brand.
3. Evaluate the types of content that perform best on those platforms. Narrowing the scope of your audience and social media channels will allow you to focus on the kinds of content to create and eventually how that content should be designed. Some of the types of content you can create will be set by the platform (Instagram favors imagery and video, Twitter favors short messages and clips). Each platform should have a how-it-works page that will explain the media constraints. Other types of content will be based on common user trends: although people have the ability to create videos and written messages on Facebook, many users use the platform to share article links. Spend some time reviewing user activity, paying close attention to your competitors, to get an idea of how to best use each channel.

List, brief and schedule your design assets

Now that you have a better idea of your audience and the channels you’ll be using, you can start mapping out a design pipeline with a series of briefs. This, along with a content calendar, will help keep you organized through the design process. Make sure to document the following:

• Upcoming content plans
• The goal of the content
• Intended audience
• Competitor content examples
• Design medium (photograph, video, illustration, animated gif)
• Caption or text copy
• Design references

Keep a reference of the content sizes and dimensions for each social media platform

A reference of social media content sizes and dimensions is must-have for any designer. This allows you to quickly size your canvases and to adapt designs across different platforms. Social media sizes tend to change now and again, so be sure to update this list regularly. As of June 2020, here are the sizes and dimensions for common social media platforms:

	Instagram image dimensions	Twitter image dimensions	Facebook image dimensions	LinkedIn image dimensions	YouTube image dimensions
Profile picture	110 x 110px	400 x 400px	180 x 180px	200 x 200px	800 x 800px
Square image	1080 x 1080px
Portrait image	1080 x 1350px
Instagram stories	1080 x 1920px
Cover image		1500 x 500px	820 x 312px	1584 x 396px	2,560 x 1,440px
Content image		1024 x 512px	1200 x 630px	1104 x 736px
FB event image			1920 x 1080px
Company profile picture				300 x 300px
Company cover image				1192 x 220px
Video thumbnail					1280 x 720px

 

Tips on designing your social media profile page
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Now that you have a strategy in place, you’re ready to set up your social media profiles for success. Your profile is the homepage to your social media account. It is where users will go when they search your name or are otherwise directed via a link. It is also where the “Follow” button will live—a well-executed profile design can make the difference in whether or not they click it.

The goal of your profile page is to tell prospective followers who you are. While your bio should lay this out in a few concise statements, the design of your profile will do so visually, using color, shape and imagery to express your brand identity. This means avoiding graphics that are outside of your brand guidelines or pretty for the sake of pretty. The graphics should say something about you. When deciding on imagery for your profile page, ask yourself critically what story each graphic is telling about you and make sure that narrative is consistent across platforms.

>>Check out our guide to branding yourself on social media

To help you get the most out of your profile design, we’ll go through the common components of a social media profile and provide tips on how to leverage each for branding.

Profile picture design

Your profile picture (or avatar) is, along with your handle, your online identity. It is the part of your profile that will be seen outside of your profile page, acting as a signature for your posts. This is why profile pictures are generally small, to give more attention to your actual posts. With that in mind, focus your avatar on simplicity. Some brands can get away with using their entire logo if it’s legible at a tiny size. Many brands will instead opt for an abbreviated version (either the first letter in the brand name or the logomark by itself). Backing this version of the logo with a bold color or pattern can help it stand out. Also keep in mind that although dimensions are given in a square orientation, most platforms use circular avatars.