Social Page Design
When marketing a product or service is your main professional concern, you know that building a memorable brand and maintaining its glow through thick and thin is of absolute importance, representing the difference between reaching your potential customers and missing them altogether. In a world full of technology and emerging communications platforms, it can be easy to allow your brand to get lost among the seemingly endless channels through which you promote your brand.
When utilizing social media has proven crucial to furthering your marketing efforts and increasing sales, it is of the utmost importance that your brand and its message doesn’t suffer for it. With that thought in mind, have a look at four design ideas for customizing social media pages and utilizing them fully.
1. Image is everything
Whether you’re creating a Facebook fan page, getting your company hooked up with LinkedIn or beginning to tweet service updates and product offerings to your new followers via Twitter, it is crucial that you are sure that your brand’s image is congruent across platforms. If your main website is using a blue and white color palette, be sure that the images you use to decorate your social page are in the same vein, giving your users a feeling of continuation when they visit your social media offerings.
Also highly important is your company logo or mascot, that familiar image that likely appears on every page of your website, giving your visitors instant insight into what you’re about, what you do and what you can offer them. In a situation like that offered by Facebook fan pages, color manipulation abilities are limited and your prominently displayed logo will create an air of familiarity that will give your customers confidence.
2. Keep it Simple
If you are an active consumer as well as a marketing professional than you’ve surely come across social pages in which information, outbound links and functionality are difficult to discern. No matter how easy your chosen social media platform makes it to retain built-in functionality, the right mess of badly formatted or ill placed text and links can ruin it, making your social page a confusing mess and sending your visitors and followers packing.
Work hard to use included functionality to your benefit; for example, given the fact that Facebook offers very specific fields to present information like your mission statement, your company background and details on your products and services, there is no need to go too far outside of the box.
Good design almost always translates as simple design, wherever and whenever possible, and this rule applies to your social media pages as well.
3. Keep Things Fresh
When the initial planning has been completed and the design and information scheme have been successfully implemented into your new social media page, you should allow yourself only mere moments to admire your work! A successful social marketing campaign begins with good design but continues and ends with active, hands-on marketing. Keep your Facebook page fresh with new information and offers, message your Twitter followers to check on their needs, upload new videos to your YouTube channel and so on, or risk losing your visitors and potential customers to the page next door.
4. Analyze, Adapt & Attack!
Once you’ve got your social media campaign underway, take the time to monitor the results very closely. Request feedback from customers, measure your lead to sale ratio on a daily basis and constantly work to adapt your design and interactivity approach to better suit the needs of your visitors and customers. Knowledge is power and this is never more true than when said regarding business metrics!
Social media pages are meant to be less a reflection of your company’s design capabilities and more a platform to interact with your visitors on an intimate level in order to generate new traffic, new leads and new sales. With the right combination of design techniques and after-design attention, your foray into social media for business is sure to get off to a successful start!
