Today, social media is an essential part of every entrepreneurs day. But, it’s a waste of your valuable time if you’re using it improperly. Social media is your path to standing out from the crowd and being recognized. Strong design is essential for both of these to happen. If you’re not standing out, it’s time for a social media makeover.
How do you know it’s time for a social media makeover?
Does your social media posting have no rhyme or reason. Is it random, without clear goals. Are you spending lots of time posting but it looks bland and gets no engagement. All your effort isn’t translating into the growth or profit that you are hoping for.
You know your brand could look better. Do you scroll through your content, wondering why it’s not getting engagement? Do you imagine how your brand could look a little better? You know that your brand should look unified, professional and relevant. But you don’t know how to do it, or you can’t afford to hire a designer.
Or, you aren’t on social media. You have an established business, with a website up and running, but you need to get your brand on social media.
Are you just starting out? Maybe it’s a small business or side hustle, and you want to use social media to your benefit, from the beginning.
It doesn’t matter if it’s taking someone’s wardrobe from drab to fab, or transforming dull living spaces into a dream home, everybody loves a good makeover. Probably because we like to see people living their best lives.
As an entrepreneur, your social media channels are no different. Giving your brand a social media makeover goes further than just looking good.
Having an engaging presence on social media can help you develop and maintain a competitive edge. Social media can set you up to sell more, and help your business thrive.
Maintaining a social media account might feel like a productive use of your time. However, if you’re not focused in the digital world, you may be wasting your time and energy without helping your brand.
You need to make social media work for you, gaining you leads, fans, subscribers, customers and recognition. Your results need to be worth the effort.
I want to share ideas to help create the best brand presence you possibly can. Learn how to increase your odds of succeeding in the social media jungle.
Hopefully this knowledge, will show you how to create professional-looking designs too, in the form of Layout Collections in GoDaddy Studio.
What does a great social media feed look like?
Which social media accounts do you love to see pop up on your phone? That’s not by accident. Their attractive appearance takes upfront work to establish the solid foundations their brand is built on.
Brands with great social media feeds typically get at least some of these things right:
Publish excellent content. Their content is inspirational, informative, or entertaining, while providing some value to their target audience.
Have a distinct identity. When it’s done well, you can recognize a brand at a glance before you even read the first word. A coherent brand identity makes their business space stand out from the personal accounts that are intermingled on your feed.
Touch on a defined pool of topics. You can’t talk about everything to everyone, narrow your chosen topics down to some recurring themes, centered on their audience, their product, and their values. Where these intersect, is their sweet spot; the conversation they can own.
There’s a defined cadence. Whether it’s three times a day or three times a week, a brand is more likely to show up in our feeds and become memorable to its audience if they have a regular publishing routine. Diligence is rewarded on most algorithms, too!
They value aesthetics. Brands that do well on social media have quality, well-considered content that makes your eyes happy. They have beautiful photos, playful design, popping colors, gorgeous fonts, and eye-catching graphics that elevate a post from a random photo to a work of art. Some of the best brands regard their feed as an ever-evolving work of art.
Their content is actionable. There’s a clear message telling the reader what to do. Whether it’s entering a competition, commenting on a particular post, or signing up for a product or service.
They create content with mutual benefit in mind. This means either delivering a moment of insight or delight, or creating a chance for the reader to reap some benefit. The benefit could be a discount, a sale, a competition, a lesson, or the chance to gain more information about a topic.
They engage with customers and other brands. Popular brands are responding to comments, thanking customers for compliments, or solving simple problems, rather than publishing a piece of content and never interacting with it again. They’re part of like-minded online communities and business networks, engaging with these conversations.
They engage with current events, trends and memes. Inasmuch as we’re encouraging planning, the brands who are strong on social don’t lock things in months ahead without making space for some spontaneous reactions. Bernie on a chair, anyone?
They sync with special days, seasons and holidays. In doing this, they’re responding to a world that’s constantly in flux.
Most of all, brands doing well on social media are the ones who are using their social media channels to help them achieve their business goals.
How do you get started on a social media makeover?
It may seem overwhelming to try and get to the same level as bigger, more established brands. However, this is absolutely an attainable goal that you can do yourself, without spending money on hiring a designer.
Even if you’re a single person side hustle, looking premium will create that perception of professionalism. Nobody needs to know it’s just you and your phone.
Remember that it’s more than a once-off brand revamp. Reinventing yourself is an essential habit to develop as an entrepreneur. Luckily, it’s something you can get better and better at over time, and the proof of the pudding is in the tasting: growth.
We’re going to show you how to up your game on social media, with some best practice tips combined with stacks of practical know-how. But before we dive into the creative stuff, it’s important to address the reasons behind why you’re doing this. Getting this down before you start redesigning will help you reap both immediate and long-term benefits.
What does a social media makeover involve?
There are five fundamental steps you need to walk through when it comes to pulling off a successful social media makeover, with questions to ask yourself at each stage. Let’s take a closer look:
1. What is your purpose?
Why are you on social media in the first place? What are you trying to achieve? Which platforms are right for you, in terms of your big goals? Remember that you don’t have to be everywhere at once.
What’s worked/not worked for you in the past?
Be honest, and learn from your mistakes — as well as your successes of course. What’s your brand really about, beyond profit? How do you want to show up and engage on social media, and how do you want your audience to view you?
2. Set measurable goals
Do you want to get more sales, more leads, more engagement or building a community, set a target and a timeline for attaining your goals. Starting out, don’t over complicate this step. Use your best guess as a baseline. You might want to gain 100 new subscribers a month, or 15% more traffic to your blog via Instagram. Once data starts rolling in, adjust your targets weekly or monthly.
Hopefully, your feed will start looking more stylish and coherent, creating an impression of improvement. But make sure your goals are something you can measure directly, to keep you on course and motivated.
The good news is that most social platforms have easy access to basic analytics, for free. You don’t need to get neck-deep in the data, but you do want some objective measure to know if your numbers are moving up or down. This basic data will guide your strategy on an ongoing basis.
3. Find your brand’s unique style
Nobody knows your brand better than you. So, what is it’s personality: bold or classic? Playful or street? The design will ultimately create this impression to new customers.
Luckily, there are 13 different styles to guide you here, so you can choose the one that’s absolutely right for you. Naturally, you can customize your unique brand identity, but it’s useful to start with some guardrails.
Remember, your style is inextricably linked to your audience. It reflects a worldview, and not just a “look.”
Once you have your unique style in mind, take some time to explore all the graphics, logos, images, color palettes, and fonts we have in GoDaddy Studio. Save your favorites — these will form part of your brand identity kit.
4. Customize templates and layout collections
This is the fun part! Find templates for the formats you’ll be using the most, whether it’s a competition poster or a YouTube thumbnail. We have thousands of designs, grouped by platforms, occasions, and styles.
Layout collections make the process even easier, by offering you a full pack of consistently designed templates across a range of formats and platforms.
Customize templates by applying your brand’s unique graphics, fonts, colors, logo, and images to a professional design.
Find the layout collection that suits your brand best and customize it with your brand’s colors, fonts, logo, graphics, and images.
5. Plan ahead with a content calendar
Content for a week: Pick a few types of social content that you produce on a regular basis. These could include discussion topics, product features, user showcases, links to your blog, motivational quotes… the options are endless, but narrow it down to keep your brand’s messaging consistent.
Content for a month: Look at the upcoming month(s) to identify special days, holidays, or cultural moments that might create opportunities to produce relevant content.
Content for a year: Identify a few key holidays/seasons/events that hold maximum marketing potential for your brand well in advance. Use the time to plan campaigns — a sale, a competition, an event — for maximum impact.
Once you have the basic principles in place by working through this framework, the design process should be more logical, much easier, and — most importantly — more fun than complicated. As an everyday entrepreneur, you’ve got a ton of things on your to-do list.
Creating content shouldn’t be sucking hours out of your day, or hundreds of dollars out of your business account.
Make your brand beautiful
Templates and layout collections make it super easy to create a full social media kit with your unique brand identity: simply add your brand’s fonts, colors, graphics, and images to professionally designed templates.
Our layout collections were created with this exact function in mind, to allow you to develop a consistent library of ready-to-go content, instead of designing from templates one at a time, as the need arises. Remember: the secret to success is to have your brand vision and goals clearly identified before you start.
Now that we’ve broken it down for you, giving your brand a social media makeover doesn’t sound that overwhelming, does it? You’ve got this.
