Social media tips to turn heads!

It’s 2020 and Instagram is still the ideal platform to share your brand’s personality. Helping inspire your customer base to buy into your product or service and continue to engage a new audience.

One of the most engaging ways to communicate on the channel is through carousel posts. For those that are unaware – a carousel post is a creative way to get more content into a smaller space. You can feature up to 10 unique images, each with different headlines, descriptions, and URLs all within the same story.

With that in mind, influencers and brands still struggle to create engaging carousels. But don’t worry, by the end of this article, you will well-placed to create engaging carousels to help achieve your goals.

1. Boring cover slide

The first point of call for an Instagram carousel is always the cover slide. The cover slide will be the first thing a user sees when scrolling through their Instagram feed. The aim of a good cover slide is to stop the scroll! The visual should spark interest in the topic, giving readers no excuse but to read on.

2. Front-heavy carousels

Many carousels feature way too much information on the first few pages. This creates more work for the audience and increases the likelihood of them dropping off the post or zoning out. If you’ve got a lot of information, simply space the carousel out to 8 or 10 slides.

3. Not enough visuals

Instagram is a visual platform. People react better to posts that are engaging and visually pleasing. So make sure your carousel has simple messages with minimal text to help create engaging carousels. Sometimes, the most effective carousel can simply be a single image split into different slides. Something that everybody is capable of creating with the help of a photo editing app.

4. Weak CTAs

Strong calls-to-action are important on any platform. A value-driven CTA will help improve engagement from the user tenfold. Whereas a fake question to trigger comments will have little importance to both parties.

5. Believing they need to be static

Many believe that video carousels are difficult to produce and often, more time-consuming than static images. This is a common misconception, as most mobile phones are capable of recording high-quality videos ready for social in a fraction of the time.

6. Low-resolution images

Due to the nature of carousels, images used NEED to be a higher resolution in comparison to normal-post counterparts. It’s common for marketers to use a low-resolution image, reducing the quality of the content.

If you can avoid even some of these common mistakes, you’ll begin to see an improvement in your carousels. Keep creating, keep improving and if you need a little help along the way, Momentum is always here to help.

Momentum’s simple design tips

At Momentum, we understand that design can be tricky for small businesses and beginners. Making graphic and animations that POP can be time-consuming, energy-sapping and, above all else, difficult.

With this in mind, the team has produced a short guide to help all you aspiring creatives along the way.

1. Be careful with margins and spacing

Clean design requires attention-to-detail. Visualise your design beforehand and plan out where you want each of your elements to sit on the canvas. Is it easy to understand? Does it look clean? Ask yourself these questions and even get a second pair of eyes to check it works.

As a rule of thumb, make sure to leave a 50 pixel/12mm margin at the edges of the canvas so nothing is too close to the edge.

Layout in design

2. Use complementary colours

Using contrasting and complementary colours are crucial to good design. Pick a group of colours to use as a palette and stick to it. A simple guide for picking a colour guide can be found here. Once decided, make sure to contrast between different elements and highlight the key features of the graphic with a stand out colour.

Colour in design

3. Pay attention to typography

Different fonts work with different graphics. For example, bold fonts will work for headlines and strong graphics. Whilst thin, handwritten fonts will provide a more delicate feel to the overall design.

As another rule of thumb, try using no more than two fonts/weights to keep the design simple and easy to understand.

Typography in design

4. Don’t be afraid to include visual textures

Our favourite part of striking graphic design is adding textures. Textures like broken glass, lens flares and vintage paper all help bring a graphic together. These are key to creating compelling and lifelike designs. It creates a visual illusion that invokes an emotive response from the viewer. Making your graphics eye-catching and ultimately, more memorable.

Crumpled texture

5. Ask for help

Don’t be averse to asking for help. Everybody has their own skillsets, a limited amount of resources and time. If you find you’re struggling to create content for your channels – simply ask for help. There’s plenty of experts that know what makes good design and what doesn’t.

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