4 Practical Tips for Creating Social Media Visual Content to Boost Engagement

Image Source: Pexels

Posting a meme or two on your Facebook page is not enough to engage your social media audiences effectively.

To drive meaningful audience engagement, you’ll need to level up your social media content. 

One way of doing this is to create captivating visual content that encourages audience interactions and drives engagement—from likes and shares to conversions. 

The challenge is that creating visual content takes time and effort, including research, a solid content strategy, and the right tools. 

Fortunately, we’re here to help with these four best practices for social media visual creation to increase your audience engagement.

1. Use simple images

Compelling visual content doesn’t always have to be elaborate or complex to effectively engage your social media audiences. 

Simple images with engaging captions and descriptions can often do the trick when used the right way, 

You can use high-quality stock photos relevant to your products or brand, add an appropriate or interesting caption, and share them across your social media pages. 

Get high-quality, royalty-free stock photos from websites such as Pexels. It offers thousands of stock images and videos for various industries and topics. 

Image source: pexels.com. 

Choose one and add your captions. You can even follow tried and tested content writing tips to create killer descriptions to help drive engagement.

Simplify your visual content creation using reliable social media marketing platforms such as Vista Social. 

The platform lets you create, edit, and schedule your posts, such as your interaction posts for social media, to publish automatically across your social media profiles. 

Image source: vistasocial.com. 

You won’t need to post your images and other content manually. Plus, you can plan your content distribution and auto-publishing seamlessly. 

You can streamline your social media marketing tasks, saving you a lot of work hours and energy. 

2. Illustrate your taglines with images

Another way to leverage images to create engaging social media content is to use photos and other visuals to illustrate and reinforce your brand’s taglines. 

It’s a strategic way to draw attention to your social media pages while boosting brand awareness and recognition and, in turn, audience engagement. 

It can also help your brand’s tagline stand out from competitors on social media. 

For example, if you’re a B2B company offering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services, you can use your logo as your Facebook profile with your “Buy SEO Articles, Get Free Backlinks” tagline against a brand-relevant cover photo. 

Gatorade does this well by using a powerful Facebook cover photo with its “Fuel Tomorrow” tagline. 

Image source: facebook.com. 

The more visually attractive and memorable your text and visual content combination, the higher the chances of your target audiences recognizing your brand, which is always great for boosting engagement. 

You can also switch up your cover photo based on certain holidays, events, or trending topics that currently hold your target audience’s interest.

Get valuable insights about your customers’ unique needs and preferences from reliable customer tracking software to help inform your visual content strategy.

3. Get creative with infographics

When designed well, infographics can be excellent visual content for increasing your brand’s engagement. 

Infographics allow you to put complex or numerous information into a visual and easier-to-digest format. 

For instance, you can create infographics to outline a case study, data-based articles, listicles, reports, industry facts, survey results, and more.  

Infographics can help you share relevant information in an engaging format, allowing you to connect with your audience better. 

Some creative infographics you can create and share on social media include the following.

• Data visualizations. Use pie charts, bar graphs, or both to visualize your data-rich content. 

• Timelines. A timeline infographic is great for presenting a series of events or changes over a certain period. For example, you can use infographics to display a simple flow of your company’s history, making it easy for readers to follow.  

• Process. Like the timeline format, you can create infographics showing a simple process, such as the basic steps of buying your product. Include numbers, arrows, and pointers to guide your readers’ eyes through the process. 

• Lists. Use list infographics to outline quick and top tips. For example, if your business is within the cybersecurity industry, you can share a list infographics of the top vulnerability scanning software. 

• Comparative. Create infographics comparing two or more topics relevant to your audience. For instance, you can create a buyer’s guide or summary in an infographic to help your readers compare multiple products.  

Use graphic design tools such as Canva to create beautiful infographics easily. 

Image source: canva.com.

Canva has thousands of templates you can customize and design tools you can use to create infographics for your social media marketing and audience engagement efforts.

Infographics are best shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.  

4. Utilize text overlays

One of the best ways to spice up your social media visuals is to use text overlays in your images. 

For example, you can add compelling and relevant phrases to photos of your products, events, services, special promotions, and more.  

It can help make your visual content more attractive and engaging, helping you connect with your audience. 

You can take a high-quality product photo and include catchy, funny, or witty words and phrases that draw your audience’s attention and even enjoy and relate with your content. 

Folger’s Instagram photo with a witty and relatable text overlay is a good example. 

Image source: instagram.com. 

A great photo with an attention-grabbing text overlay can make your visual content highly shareable, boosting your audience engagement. 

You can always test your social media visuals to gauge your audience’s reactions and include them in your content tracking strategy. 

Doing so helps you assess your visual content’s performance, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments for improvement. 

Get more engagement with visual content

Creating visual content pieces for social media can take time and effort, but these can also get you excellent returns. 

Take inspiration from the time-tested tips in this guide, invest in the right tools, and develop a solid content strategy to get more out of your social media visuals. 

While boosting your audience engagement rate won’t happen overnight, learning from best practices can lead your social media marketing efforts to success.