5 things to consider when creating your social media feed

Why does having a chosen look or aesthetic on social media matter? Quite often the first thing people look into for a brand or company is their profile overall. If it’s a well put together one with an overall theme or look then there is a higher chance that they could stick around and have a look. If they see an overall view of your profile and its well done and each image is considered, they can tell that you care about the content and put the effort in. If they see images all over the place with random colours and piece of content that don’t flow well together the page looks a bit random and sporadic and can put people off. Which is why having a well put together profile is a useful first stage in engaging with your audience. We have put together some steps for you to take.

Sticking to your brands colours and style of images:

The first step that we think you should take into account is that you’ll want to decide on the overall look of your page that you desire. A great place to start is to get inspired by pages that you like the look of. Then you can ask yourself these 5 questions:

What does their feed look like?
What colours do they use, and how many colours do they use?
Do they have a style of image that they use?
Do there images use patterns or design overlays or is it just the images?
Do they post more than one type of medium? Images or Videos or both?

Once you have gone through between 3-5 different accounts that you like you can put those answers together and figure out what you want to follow for your own account. Following those questions you should have the following items: the main colours you’re going to use, the style of images you are going to use/take, if you’ll be putting a design overlay on the images and if your timeline will consist of images, videos or both.

Maintain the aesthetic:

Once you have created your brand aesthetic, you’ll want to preserve it. Having a uniform look is a very useful first step on social media. When people come across your brand/profile on social media, they quite often view the profile of interest. When they view your branded timeline with all of your images being the same style, colours and with high quality images and videos, they’ll see that as a brand who cares about its image.

When maintaining your brand aesthetic, the questions to ask yourself to see if the images fits your brand are:

Do the images style match our previous images?
Do the colours we are using fit the brand aesthetic?
If I saw this image on my timeline at home, would I stop and look?

Why are these questions important? Because they help you uphold your brands image and identity. The last questions on the list above is subjective of course. We don’t know who is going to stop and have a look, but we can try our best to make them stop and look by producing the best pieces of content that we can.

Balance of Content types:

Mixing up the types of content is a very good way to recapture your audience’s interest and attention. Mixing in video and images together is great for your audience’s attention and retention. People love to watch videos on social media. In regards to different types of content we don’t just mean videos and images. We mean the content within the images and videos themselves. Take a clothing brand as an example, if you saw them selling their products solely on a white background over and over again, you’d get quite bored of it. When they mix in images and videos of; the designs being created, the creation of the fabrics, the sewing of the materials, models wearing it and their customers wearing their products, it grabs your attention.

If you post the same type of content with similar images and videos you’ll lose your audience’s attention and interest, they’ll become numb to your content in a way. So why not mix some different content in there?

Audience Members, Old vs New:

When your brand is putting out its branded imagery you’ll have two types of people view it. Your returning audience and new audience members. Your returning audience member are people that are already following your brand, or someone who keeps track of your brand. The new audience members are people who are viewing your content for the first time.

The two goals in most basic terms are; to keep the returning audience members, and to turn the new audience members into returning ones. How do you do that though? That’s the million pound question. Everyone is different, so there is no way to keep everyone happy, but what you can do is to put out the highest quality content that your returning audience like. Good quality content can entice new audience members to follow your brand, and for current audience members to keep returning. Taking all of that into consideration, all you can do is post the best quality content for your brand.

Planning in advance:

We have preached this time and time again, once you have found the aesthetic or look that you are happy with and that fits your brand, stick with it. Yes some days your posts won’t do so well and in contrast some days they will do really well, but don’t get phased by that, and stay on track. Planning is one of the most powerful tools in your roster. Planning is a fantastic way to stay on top of the brand and image you are either creating or upholding.

Planning doesn’t just mean knowing what days you’ll be posting and at what time, but what content fits your audience on that day specifically. Having the elements that you’re going to overlay on an image set up for two weeks time. If you have your images and content ready for around two-three weeks in advance and maintaining that threshold, you’ll find yourself using the tool that is social media to your advantage and to the benefit of your audience.

There are many different moving parts to consider when you’re posting online. We think that these 5 basic steps are a very good start to helping you to think of things to consider when you’re posting online. There are many more things to consider than just these 5 items, but it’s a start. We hope that this list helped and if you are wondering what type of content is popular at the moment, be sure to check out our other blog on collages taking over 2019.

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact the YCD team