Marcus Ho / October
17, 2018
Are you looking to raise your engagement
levels across all your social media platforms?
With the continually changing algorithms
on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,
getting higher social engagement can be increasingly difficult if you aren’t
producing the right type of visuals.
Across our research over the last couple of
months, we have looked into what type of visual images on social media tend to
get more social engagement and shares, over others.
In this article, you will learn about the four
types of visuals that will get the highest amount of engagement.
1. Artistic
Illustrations
Artistic illustrations are visuals that rely
on vector-based illustrations.
In the examples below, you’ll see artistic
illustrations – simple drawings – that are a great complement to the content
copy.
Important: the colors must contrast with each
other for the visual to truly stand out.
In this post, MIT Technology Review is trying to communicate a project about human cells being invulnerable to infection.
The visual shows an illustration of a human
cell with boxing gloves, seemingly pushing away the “bad cells” within this
short animated visual.
This post communicates the difference between disruptive innovation and radical innovation in the copy.
But the visual complements the copy by showing
an example of the gap with an illustrated visual of an object that is both a
pencil and a toothbrush.
This post by Futurism has an intent of drawing
curiosity from its audience.
By looking at the visual, one might get a
little more interested in what this content is all about.
2. Creative Display of
Statistics
Statistics are a great way to keep your
audience informed about any particular topic.
But most brands are doing it wrong.
Why?
Because they’re using statistics in the form
of visuals filled with text.
When publishing content relating to
statistics, you have to be more creative about how you intend to produce these
visuals.
Here are three quick examples:
In this post, Harvard Business Review shows how a job promotion can potentially change employees’ perception of the company culture.
The visual image is created based on research
and survey on this topic.
Since this post about a CEO’s study on how
much time he has spent answering emails, the visual image was actually created
based on the actual time he spent attending to his emails.
Such visuals can communicate a great story.
This post by International Space Station shows the number of spacewalks done between U.S. and Russian Spacesuits.
3. Clever Usage of
Typography
Brands have been creating social media posts
based on quotes because the marketers behind these brands know that such
content typically earns a decent amount of engagement.
However, such types of materials have been
overly used, and they no longer can get high engagement levels anymore.
The good news?
If you intend to create such posts, there are
ways to design it so that you can still make exciting content around quotes.
The trick is to develop them creatively by
playing around with colors, patterns, and typography.
This post was about Australia, so the
background image was the Opera House, an iconic tourist spot within the
country.
The font sizes and colors used in them were
intentionally tweaked to show how the country has progressed economically.
This visual image is based on a quote.
The highlighted text in red also emphasizes
another point that the quote was trying to communicate.
The colors used in this visual are not only
contrasting with each other, but they help to make your content truly stand out
in your audience’s news feed.
4. Filtered
Photography
Yes, we know posting well-taken photos are
another way of getting high social engagements.
But what if we don’t have excellent
photography skills?
This is where filtered photography comes as a
great help.
By using a pink filter in this photo, the
visual can now stand out on its own despite a picture that may not be
professionally shot.
Here’s another visual that was created based
on putting a few photos together, and adding some layers and borders around it.
Again, the colors used as filters were
intentionally selected so that the visual will stand out in news feeds.
Tools to Create these
Vivid Visuals
Now you know the four types of visuals that
can draw higher social media engagement for your brand.
So how do you actually go about creating them?
Here are three tools that can help you.
Canva
Canva is one of my personal favorite tools.
With Canva, you can easily create social media
posts for any platform with their preset image sizes.
However, like any software, Canva has its own
set of limitations as well.
Stencil
When creating posts based on quotes, Stencil
is a useful tool to explore.
You can use its simple image creation tool to
quickly get any quote published on your social media profiles within a few
minutes.
Piktochart
Trying to get more creative with some
statistics?
Try using Piktochart.
The tool is intuitive enough to help you
communicate across the statistics and data visually.
Conclusion
Creating vivid visuals like these may come
across as a lot of hard work, but the aforementioned tools can do a lot of the
heavy lifting for you.
So have fun with them, and be sure to measure
over time what types of visual tend to do better with your audience.
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