Social Media Tools: Does Content Layout Matter?

Building up your quiver of social media tools has never been more important. What with increased competition from online competitors, decrease reach from many platforms (especially Facebook), and increased digital advertising costs providing details on social media performance and enhancing that performance require better social media tools.

That said, I’m sure we all encounter website pages that just don’t work — they’re cluttered, unappealing, bury the call to action, or just aren’t that compelling. Thus, good copywriting is a critical element of your social media tools. But, layout matters, too. To help you, Wishpond recently published a must-read post on optimizing your landing pages. You can find the entire post here. Wishpond provides several alternative layouts for landing pages which you need to add to your existing social media tools.

White space

Adding white space — not literally white necessarily, but copy-free — is an important element in creating good content layout. Even content-heavy websites need the clean look provided by sufficient white space.

Creating the feel of more white space in content-heavy pages, use headings  (H1, H2 and H3) and design elements such as bullet points to draw attention to major points and chunk paragraphs using short sentences.

Forget what you learned in English class about needing 3+ sentences in a paragraph and multiple paragraphs under each heading. It just doesn’t work in digital publishing.

Not only does the content chunking make it easier for visitors to skim your content, it adds more white space while allowing for more content.

Notice how the content layout above and the one to the left use short paragraphs to draw the reader down the page and keep similar design elements together.

Color

Add some knowledge of color and how it impacts emotions to your list of social media tools. For instance, red means excitement, but also danger so using it in your call to action may have negative connotations. Meanwhile, blue evokes emotions of trust, dependability, and strength.

Also, keep a color wheel handy to help combining colors on the page without making the page uncomfortable for visitors.

You’ll also want to consider contrast between colors used on a given page to make important elements, such as your call to action pop and make them easy to find. Hence, using blue as your background color might work best with orange or green as high contrast colors.

Typography

Typography refers to the font and size of your text. You should consider your target audience and competitors in determining the appropriate typography. For instance, I have a website where the target audience is older, so we used a larger font size to make it easy for visitors to read.

Don’t be afraid to add custom fonts to your social media tools. Many sites offer free or low-cost custom font types, while other sites provide the tools necessary to create your own custom fonts. According to best practice advice, digital users prefer san-serif (cleaner because they lack little flourishes called serifs at the end of letters) to serif fonts.

A custom font is a cheap and easy way to distinguish your website pages from your competitors. Plus, custom fonts are super easy to change with simple CSS.

Put it all together

Designing a new website page should involve a series of thoughtful steps — not just sitting down and creating a page. Here’s my suggestion:

1. Look at design templates and choose 1 that works to reach your goals — ie. landing pages seeking subscribers have different design elements from sales pages.
2. Sketch out how you want the page to look — choosing elements such as color, white space, and typography.
3. Show your sketches around to get feedback.
4. Create your webpage using your sketch.
5. Build in A/B test for major elements. For instance, you might test different colors for your call to action buttons. Monitor the performance of each version and keep the one performing best.
6. Monitor movement down the sales funnel to identify possible problem areas, then solve the problems. For instance, if visitors drop out of the funnel at a particular step, such as at your email signup form, you might reduce the amount of information required on the form to see if this improves dropout.

Need help?

Whether you need a complete analytics strategy, some help with brand marketing, or some consulting to learn how to optimize post content, we can fill your digital marketing funnel. We can help you do your own social media marketing better or do it for you with our community managers, strategists, and account executives. You can request a FREE introductory meeting or sign up for my email newsletter to learn more about social media marketing.