When you’re casually scrolling through your social media feeds, it’s very easy to zone out amidst the ending flicking, barely paying a second’s notice to most of the posts that fly under your radar. Whilst individual posts can catch your attention, it takes a carefully thought out and well-curated feed to make a lasting impression that has you coming back for more, again and again. That’s where your brand's social media aesthetic gets its chance to shine. Across visual platforms like Instagram, your aesthetic is the first thing potential customers and clients will notice when they go to check you out. Not just visually pleasing, unique, consistent, and cohesive social media aesthetics can help build plenty of brand recognition to give your platforms their best shot of success.
Conveying brand messaging, tone of voice, personality, and visual style, opting to take the time to find the perfect aesthetic rather than making it up on the fly will help your followers (and potential customers) recognise your content as soon as it hits their feed. Through eye-catching imagery, consistent and interesting colour schemes and palettes, and a unique focus on what sets your brand apart, your profile can stand out from the competition, becoming the engaging go-to brand and helping to accurately reflect your distinctive character to create a more memorable presence that aligns across all your platforms. Here’s how…
Unifying all individual posts into the one consistent social media voice, your brand's chosen/pre-determined social media aesthetic should always naturally flow and stem from your brand's identity. The more you understand your brand identity, then the easier it will be to represent that and transfer it across to your social media presence and future marketing materials, creating the one united aesthetic. Deciphering your brand identity and deciding on how you want to represent yourself on social media is the key to cracking the question of aesthetics. Taking cues from your core values, your key messaging, your established brand guidelines, as well as pre-existing marketing materials and website assets can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to defining your social media aesthetic and how you want your brand to be perceived online, whether that’s serious, jovial, vibrant, or authoritative on all things you specialise in.
When done right, and there’s no internal identity crisis, your social media aesthetic can help your audience get the right feel for who you are without even diving into a single post or crawling your captions. Repetitive visual elements or effects that make consistent appearances throughout your feed can help your brand’s social media aesthetic pop just that little bit more, presenting the business so that stands it out from the status quo, providing your audience with something fresh and different that drowns out the competition.
As vital as it is to understand your brand’s identity to define your social media aesthetic and content output, that would all be wasted if you didn’t have a club about who your audience is. What could be worse than consistently missing the mark by adopting an aesthetic style and content schedule that goes way over the head of your actual followers? More than just a waste of time and resources, you could soon see your audience following begin to dwindle if you’re aesthetic doesn’t reflect what your audience wants to see or what performs best. You’ve got to ask who your target audience is and what type of content will get them hooked on your page. This doesn’t have to be a stab in the dark or a calculated guess though, take a deep dive into your current followers and your previous post to find who’s got their eyes on you, and what pulls in the best likes and engagement so that you can create the perfect audience persona that can be the anchor which your aesthetic is tethered to.
Men and women much smarter than me have done plenty of research which shows that not only does colour influence moods because of the way people associate colours with feelings, but also that colour has the potential power to persuade buying decisions by as much as 85% whilst boosting brand recognition by 80%. What that means for your social media aesthetic is that you should be taking your choices of colour on your feed pretty seriously. Finding the right colour palette to adopt into your aesthetic should be coming from your brand guidelines, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to experiment a little and push the boat out. Providing some much sought-after consistency for your feed, the right colour palette can help tie everything together in a harmonious fashion whilst adding some dynamic splashes here and there. The ideal blend of colours, whether that’s bold choices or softer neutrals, should be the ideal reflection of your brand and the content you’re publishing. Perhaps colours could be a great indicator of the type of content category you’re posting with certain colours representing certain aspects of the brand making it all the easier for your audience to pick up on visual cues and identifying the messaging before they even read a single word.
Helping to set the mood for whatever type of content you’re posting, your chosen colour palette should be a neat rotation of consistent choices that help to project the feelings you want to be associated with, leaving room for enough variation to keep things fresh but having one set brand colour taking centre stage as a common thread throughout your feed.
