Social media presence is no more a choice for businesses but a question of priority. When it comes to growing and building an audience, social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn offer tons of value and opportunities to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
This fact is hard to ignore when you learn that out of approximately 4.5 billion global internet users, 3.8 billion use social media.
So, with the constantly changing social media algorithms, emerging trends, and ever-growing customer demands—how can you sustain or level up your social media game to grab more eyes? This answer is by maintaining a consistent and appealing social media aesthetics.
A well-defined and clean aesthetic ensures the continuous growth of your page’s traffic and engagement. Eye-catching images, consistent color schemes, and focusing on your brand’s USP can help make your page more interesting.
For example, Lorna Jane—an Australian activewear company, does a fantastic job showcasing its brand’s personality. Its playful, colorful, and inspirational profile aesthetic is one of the reasons behind it having 1 million loyal followers and a 70% increase in online sales.
So, if you’re thinking about replicating such results for your profile and improving your brand’s social media aesthetics to reflect your brand identity, we’ll cover everything in this guide.
11 effective tips to maintaining social media aesthetics
Having a social media account is one thing. But maintaining consistency with your messaging, branding, visuals, fonts, and graphics requires a whole other level of effort.
Here are some crucial tips to help you focus on the latter and grow your customer base and revenue. Let’s begin!
1. Engage with your target audience
What makes your social media content different from other similar brands? The value you add within your content speaks directly to your target audience.
You can follow trends, copy what’s working for your competitors, and even rely on repurposing. But nothing beats value-driven content to attract the audience’s eye. Ask yourself these questions before creating content for your target audience:
- Am I solving my target audience’s pain points?
- What kind of benefits or learnings am I offering my audience with this content?
- What’s my content’s USP that will make viewers choose my profile over others?
- Will this content get me returning profile visitors and even more followers?
Remember, a large following is of no use and won’t cultivate great results until you create content that interests and engages with your target audience and builds a loyal tribe that sticks around in the longer run.
McDonald’s is a case in point here. They post iconic and relatable tweets and genuinely engage with their audience—a significant reason why people love the brand, apart from just the products.
2. Keep an eye on the trends
Jumping on the trends, also known as trend jacking, is one of the best ways to grow your social media channel and ensure your posts don’t just reach your followers but also wider audiences.
But you can’t create this type of content just because it aligns with a trend. It also needs to flow naturally with your brand’s personality and communicate the intended message. Your best bet is to stay updated on trends and only hop on those relevant to your audience.
Louis Vuitton understands the assignment and makes the most out of Instagram reels by creating super creative, high-quality, and stunning reels that often go viral with an average of 7 million views.
3. Take social insights from your competitors
They say the key to boosting your brand engagement is to engage with your competitors first.
This goes true with social media as well. In fact, it’s much easier to track and analyze your competing brands on social media due to its unlocked accessibility and global availability than traditional marketing methods.
You can also use third-party social media tools like Hootsuite and SproutSocial for analyzing your competitors’ profiles and content.
Inspiration is everywhere—so see what content your competitors post, how often they post, and what kind of a profile aesthetic they maintain. This will give you crucial insights that’ll further help you improve your brand’s social media aesthetics for more visibility, followers, and better results.
4. Eye-catching visuals FTW!
Social platforms—primarily Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn- are visual-driven, demanding a brand aesthetic to grab more eyes. As a result, eye-catching visuals play a dominant role in boosting audience engagement than written words.
So, don’t fail to incorporate on-brand and appealing visuals to maintain your profile’s overall aesthetic and reach more people. You can also create a mood board for your reference to ensure consistency in your visuals across platforms.
Coca-Cola is an excellent example of this. While the brand has rebranded itself over the decades—it has retained its core characteristics and signature bright red and white brand color that’s memorable and instantly recognizable. Here’s a snapshot of its Instagram aesthetics.
Creating top quality visuals is easy these days as there are photo editors such as Canva that have simplified things. It has templates, color palettes, and editors that help you design beautiful visuals in seconds and minutes.
5. Add videos to your social content strategy
The insane boost in video marketing trends is not one you can ignore. While 93% of brands confirmed that they gained new customers after posting videos on their social media accounts, 84% of customers say that watching brand videos plays a significant role in their purchase decision.
These statistics leave no doubt that videos are powerful tools to increase audience engagement and drive product or service sales.
It’s more favorable to watch a video than read a thousand-word article or a hundred-word Instagram caption. This is because videos are more interesting, hook the audience and convey the message in a more conversational and engaging manner.
You can use videos for multiple purposes like demonstrating a new product through tutorials, promoting a new product, showing behind-the-scenes clips, showing client/customer testimonials, and connecting with the audience through live sessions.
Sephora France creates stunning Instagram reels of makeup tutorials, product demos, and user-generated content to drive engagement and encourage conversations on its Instagram account.
6. The timing of your posts matter
Social media algorithms keep changing—making it harder to predict factors like the right time to get the most engagement.
While you’ve taken care of the content and aesthetics—figuring out the right time to post will help you reach the maximum number of accounts.
The two most critical factors you need to consider are:
- Knowing the right time your audience is online on different platforms and most likely to engage.
- Finding the right balance between human, genuine, and promotional posts.
Besides trial and error that can waste a lot of your time, you can use analytics tools to understand your audience’s preferences and know precisely when and how much to post. While posting too much can make your audience’s feed cramped, posting too little can make them forget about your brand—or worse, make them unfollow you and switch to your competitor.
Here are the most suitable times to post on certain social media platforms, according to Sproutsocial’s insights.
- The most suitable time to post on Instagram is 11 am.
- The best time to post on Facebook is 9 am-1 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.
- The most suitable time to post on Twitter is 9 am-3 pm on Wednesday, and 9-11 am on Tuesday and Thursday.
- The best and most suitable time to post on LinkedIn is 9 am to noon on Tuesday, and Thursday and 9 am-2 pm on Wednesday.
7. Partner with the right influencers
Influencer marketing is an excellent way to grow the quantity and quality of your social media audience. 89% of businesses say that they receive comparable or better ROI from influencer marketing than other marketing channels.
Reaching out to influencers and bloggers that complement your brand’s aesthetic and core values, building relationships, and collaborating with them will allow you to reinforce your brand’s reputation and win the trust of their audience. This will help you expand your army of loyal brand ambassadors in the longer run, allowing you to amplify brand awareness and drive more sales.
Here are a few tips for choosing the right micro or major influencers for your brand:
- Focus on their engagement rate and how well their audience resonates with their content.
- Ensure their audience is relevant to your brand, so your products/services attract or benefit them.
- Ensure you choose authentic influencers that share genuine and helpful tips, advice, stories instead of forceful promotions.
- Look for the content quality on their profiles and ensure that it’s clear, creative, consistent, and well-composed.
- Check how often they post, and ensure their social media paes reflect a perfect mix of personal and sponsored content.
Remember, the key here is not to go for an influencer with the biggest following, but one that focuses on engagement, relevance, and authenticity—because that’s where the real value lies.
Anthropologie has successfully built an army of #AnthroAmbassador collaborating with influencers like Anna Page and Thamarr to make them promote their dazzling and stunning clothes and grab more eyes.
8. Leverage the power of hashtags
From Twitter to Instagram, hashtags have brought a significant revolution in the world of social media marketing. For example, using hashtags on Twitter increases your engagement by 100%.
Hashtags help more people know about your social media presence and increase brand awareness and engagement.
It also makes it easy for the users to find relevant products and accounts by searching for a hashtag. For instance, if a user searches for #mattelipstick, all the top and relevant posts using that hashtag will appear on their Instagram feed.
A powerful hashtag campaign that matches your brand’s aesthetics is capable enough to attract a significant amount of traffic to your social media pages.
And a suitable brand example here is LorealParis that uses the powerful hashtag #LOrealWomenofWorth to promote women empowerment and celebrate 10 women each year who selflessly commit themselves to enrich the lives of the needy.
9. Incorporate storytelling
Social media posts that push more information than a product promotion and trigger an emotional response resonate more with the audience and perform better. The Digital Marketing Institute’s study proves this as it shows that effective brand storytelling on social media enhances the product’s value by 20%.
This is because storytelling that focuses on authentic experiences holds your audience’s attention for a longer period and activates emotional connections—making them want to engage with your content more often.
Nike’s social media secret to success is building an engaging community by sharing real-life stories of inspiring athletes—with a creative representation of customers or athletes using their products. Here’s an Instagram post that reflects this.
10. Build a content calendar
Creative block can peep in anytime uninformed—leaving you demotivated and uninspired to create quality content. Other factors like emergencies and time constraints can also affect your social media posting schedule—making your brand appear inconsistent and insignificant to your customers.
Hence it’s imperative to create a content calendar and keep a batch of content ready in advance to improve consistency and avoid loss of audience.
Once you have a plan of when and how you’re going to post on different social networks, build a content bank around it that can help you take control of your social media brand—ensuring your content is out at the right time.
Hootsuite is an excellent tool for planning and scheduling social media posts and gathering insightful analytics.
Here are other social media management tools to explore and schedule your posts with ease:
- Buffer for an easy and straightforward social media scheduling
- MeetEdgar for automating social media posts
- Facebook Creator Studio for scheduling Facebook posts
- Sendible to leverage quality features at an affordable price
Pro tip: Ensure to keep some breathing space between your social media content calendar to incorporate on-the-spot or trending content.
11. Monitor your social media analytics regularly
Lastly, it’s critical to determine and analyze whether all the efforts you’re putting in give you the expected results. According to a study from Hootsuite, 85% of organizations measure social media data with analytics tools to see the accurate ROI of their results.
Social media analytics help you understand whether you reach the right target group and achieve an expected ROI. They will also help you decide if you need to make necessary changes in your social media aesthetic and marketing campaigns or not.
Some analytics tools to help you monitor your social media efforts and presence are:
- SproutSocial for cross-channel social media analytics
- Curalate for Instagram analytics to maximize sales
- BuzzSumo for analyzing social media engagement of any piece of content
- Snaplytics for Instagram story and Snapchat analytics
- Keyhole for analyzing hashtag analytics
Analyzing your social media presence with factors like likes, clicks, shares, interactions, and comments will help you get insight into what works and what doesn’t—to improve your social media aesthetic accordingly.
Conclusion
Creating a social media aesthetic is one thing, and maintaining it per changing trends, algorithms, and consumer demands to sustain business growth and reach more people is entirely different.
As more and more brands and businesses hop on the social media bandwagon, the competition is getting intense—making it difficult to stand apart.
Hence, use the tips mentioned in this article to maintain a relevant and compelling social media aesthetic for your brand, reach your goals and drive more people to your profile.