Design Elements in Your Social Media

Why Design is Important in Your Social Media?

• Design elements make your social media attractive, which is a plus for visitors
• Design elements impact the usability of your website
• Recent SEO updates emphasize both usability and attractiveness elements of the site
• Design is a strong element in creating a brand for your business.  Design creates a brand image and should fit the target market and objectives of your website.
• Your design should be consistent across all your social media.
• Strong branding helps create a seamless web presence and brings your traffic from other social media where you interact

Creating Design Elements for your Social Media

I’m not a designer, but I know what I like.  I also know my target audience and have a good idea of what works for them – or I ask them.

Having designs — like logos, buttons, 3-d elements like books, etc. created professionally — gets expensive very fast.  It also takes time to work with the designer and wait for designs. We had a logo created for another blog we run — Social Media/ IS Policy.  It cost a little over $1000, took about 5 weeks,  and required multiple iterations with the designer. The designer created a logo and a blog header which he also modified as our Facebook page.  Take a look and let me know what you think (my partner — the lawyer — hates it).

Sites like 99 Designs use freelancers to create logos and other designs.  You tell them what you want and designers compete.  You pick the design you like best.  I’ve talked to people who like this, so it’s a viable option.  Currently, they charge $295 and up for a logo design, icons start at $150 and a WordPress theme starts at $495.  They promise delivery of several designs in a week or less and offer a money back guarantee. You pay for the design you want (each design has a price).

Social Media Design for DIYers

Once you have good traffic flow to your social media and it’s generating income, maybe you have the money to pay someone to design for you.  But, I don’t. All my content is free (you’re welcome), so I have to bootstrap everything I do.   I’m learning to do a little web design work on my own.  The book cover for my new book is a design I did myself (and, yes, I know.  The publisher will have his own idea for cover graphics) using Adobe Photoshop — which is a great tool, but REALLY hard to learn.  Check it out.

Now, maybe you’re too busy building engagement in your social media and creating killer content that drives traffic to your blog to learn design elements.  You can legally use graphics and photos from a number of sources — providing you provide attribution.  Adding free pictures creates an appealing home page.  I get free images from FreeDigitalPhoto.net or you can search Instagram for sharable photos.  Lots of sites also sell inexpensive images that don’t require attribution.  The image on my book is one such graphic.

Your theme can help, too.  Choose themes with a lot of flexibility and design elements you can use.  I prefer and have built my sites on the Genesis framework.  You have infinite color choices and they have great design elements through their child themes.

Usability

For my money, usability is the key issue in designing your social media.  Spend some time before you design or pay someone else to figure out what you want folks to do on your blog.  Learn new features, such as pin to top on Facebook by LIKING Facebook Marketing page.  Part of learning how to use social media is putting yourself in your visitor’s shoes.  So, figure out what they want from your site.  Make your site appealing and make navigation as intuitive as possible.

If you’re selling products, sure it’s important that the image is pretty, but it’s more important that the product is highly visible to visitors, that they can search your products the way they want, and buy with a minimum number of clicks.

Products above the fold and displayed prominently are much more valuable.  So, my new ebook offer that builds my email list is prominently displayed at the top of the page on the right.  The color is bright, contrasting nicely and drawing your attention to the image.

Meanwhile, visitors don’t come for advertising or product sales — they come to have you solve their problems.  Creating a design that organizes your information and makes it easy for visitors to find what they want serves their purposes.  My new design does this and solves problems mentioned by visitors.

What do you think?  Do you want to see how I created the new heading or ebook? Or do you think it’s too complicated to try yourself?