A Simple Guide to Working with Social Media Templates

Buying Ready-Made Social Media Templates

As mentioned above, you have the option of buying ready-made social media templates. The main benefit of buying ready-made ones is that they will save you a considerable amount of time.

With ready-made templates, you won’t have to begin your designs from scratch. You only need to make a few edits needed to customize the templates based on your brand and you will be all set.

Designing Your Own Templates

You may sometimes opt to design your own templates instead of buying ready-made templates. Perhaps the main benefit of designing your own templates from scratch is saving money.

But, you need to have basic graphic design skills, to create professional-looking social media templates. If you opt to design your own templates, then the following tips will come in handy.

Keep the Design Simple and Flat

When it comes to creating social media templates, it will be highly advisable to keep your designs simple and flat. Ideally, you need to ensure that the viewer will understand its contents at a glance.

So, if you clutter your designs with too many visual elements or you try to include too much information, you will be making it harder for the viewer to process and understand the content.

With that in mind, you need to keep your designs simple. But, this doesn’t mean that designs have to be boring. You can play around with shapes and colors to add interest to your designs – as long as you don’t go overboard.

Readability is equally important when designing social media templates. So, you should ensure the text you use is large enough. Also, it should be easily readable across all devices, be it on desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

Ensure Your Branding is Consistent

Social media is all about establishing trust and building strong relationships with your audience. And, one of the most effective ways of accomplishing this is by ensuring that your branding remains consistent across all the social media platforms that you are using.

To this end, you should make sure that you use similar fonts, colors, themes and other elements in all your templates. So, regardless of whether you will use the templates to post on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, they will have the same visual elements, making your brand consistent and recognizable.

Incorporate High-Quality Images

Social media users will be more likely to engage and share posts that have eye-catching, beautiful images. So, when designing your social media templates, you should ensure you incorporate top-quality images.

And, you don’t necessarily have to hire a photographer to shoot professional photos. You can simply download free stock photos. Also, you have the option of taking your own photos with your smartphone. You just need to ensure they are well-lit and clear.

Whether you decide to download free stock photos or take yours with a smartphone, you should ensure they are the right size. If the images that you use on the templates are too small, it’s highly likely they will appear blurry when viewed on a desktop. On the other hand, if the images are too large, they will make your templates appear cluttered or consume too much space.

Consider Different Platforms Sizes and Specifications

Different social media platforms have different recommended sizes when it comes to graphic templates. For instance, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook recommend rectangular-shaped graphic elements while Instagram recommends square-shaped graphics.

So, when you are designing your social media templates, you will need to keep this in mind. You can experiment with different designs and then choose the templates that work best with the different platforms where you have a presence.

Select Typefaces Carefully

When designing social media templates, you should go for typefaces that are not only legible but they will also convey the right voice for your brand. For headlines, you should consider using a sans-serif font while a serif font will be ideal for the body copy.

But if you want something a bit more playful, you can opt for a display font or script font. Regardless of the typefaces that you decide to go with, you should make sure they are legible even in small sizes. Also, they should work perfectly together.

In Closing

Social media templates are an asset to your business when it comes to creating high-quality social media content. Regardless of whether you decide to buy ready-made templates or design yours from scratch, they will help you to establish a stronger online presence.