The Aesthetics of Social Media

Creating and sharing great content on social media is a well-known way to develop an online presence for your business. However, regardless of how great your content is, the way you share it on Twitter and Facebook may be letting you down. We humans have very short attention spans – some even suggesting a goldfish can hold a thought for longer! Every day we are bombarded with information, adverts and of course the occasional cat video, and this means even the most compelling content can get drowned out. Here are some simple steps to creating social media posts that will look attractive, grab people’s attention and get your content read.

1. Keep it short
Text is important but less is certainly more when it comes to social media. Twitter’s 140-character limit is good practice for this, but on other platforms such as Facebook, users often get carried away. Always keep it clear and concise; a huge paragraph of text is unappealing and many will scroll straight past it.

2. DON’T SHOUT
Try to always use sentence case, as an overuse of capitals will push readers away. This is because capitals give an aggressive appearance to your posts and will make you seem unapproachable. Social media is, well, social after all.

3. Use images
Adding an attractive image can really boost your post’s aesthetic and thus get people to read your content. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and we luckily live in a world where we can easily share pictures, videos and GIFs on most social media platforms. Images will not only make your posts look more attractive, but also grab the reader’s attention. Videos are becoming increasingly popular, with eye-catching one-minute content proving a very powerful tool for conveying messages visually to your audience.

4. Facebook links
Removing the URL link from your Facebook post is a really easy and simple way to make your post appear more professional and attractive. After entering a URL into a post, a preview of the link should appear. You are then able to delete the original link, leaving you more space and less distraction for any other information you want to include.

5. The golden rules of hashtags
Hashtags are a great tool for businesses to group posts into topics and make them easily searchable. However, they are often overused and even abused, which has been exacerbated by Facebook’s introduction of the device in 2013. Again, keeping hashtags short and simple makes them more effective. Using too many in one post comes across as messy and unnecessary, so limit it to one or two relevant examples. Relevant being the key word, as using hashtags that are unsuited to your post or brand is a waste of time and bad ‘netiquette’.

Author: Courtney Farrow