Finding a Style for Your Social Media Photos

It may seem silly, but finding a style for your social media photos is one of the most important steps in moving to an online commerce platform. Your social media has become the best billboard for your brand, so make sure you take as much care with your newsfeed as you would with a print advertisement.

Curate your brand with photos of your product, your store, quotes that match your brand aesthetic, photos of your life outside of the store. There are so many options to create a stylized social media presence, but there are some guidelines you should follow too.

Consider your in-store aesthetic, does your social media reflect that properly?

Though you want to drive users to your e-commerce site right now, make sure that your social media still reflects the experience you’ve curated in your brick-and-mortar store. Keep in mind, this is why your customers come in time and time again, plus it’s an essential part of your brand experience.

If you’ve worked hard to make your store welcoming and comfortable for customers, you don’t want to seem uptight and unapproachable online. Think hard about the content you post, the captions you write, and the hashtags you use. If you want to continue conveying comfort, make sure that your written tone of voice matches that intention.

Keep things as consistent as possible. 

Make sure that all of your photos are of a consistent aesthetic. If you’ve committed to colour photos, you don’t want to make a quick change moving to just black and white. Don’t use high resolution photos and then incorporate a low resolution photo randomly in your feed. You need to make sure that your photos always have consistent lighting in your photos, the same featured colours, similar picture sizes, and consistent editing practices. If you use too many different variations of photos on your page, it will start to look disjointed and amateur.

If you would really like to share a picture that doesn’t have a place on your profile, consider adding it to your story and saving it as a highlight.

Align all of your social media profiles, but don’t post the same thing. 

I can almost guarantee that the majority of your current and potential customers have more than one social media profile on more than one app. They are likely using both Facebook and Instagram, browsing one or the other. Keep this in mind when you are stylizing photos and developing a brand voice online.

You want to give them the motivation to follow you in both places. This means including content that is only available on certain platforms and diversifying your posts across different profiles. However, don’t make them so different that they don’t appear to represent the same brand. Keep the same voice and guidelines across all of your social profiles, but change the way they’re executed.

Create a style guide and don’t stray from it. 

When you feel like you’ve found the perfect aesthetic, write it down! Write down the fonts that you use, and the colours you prefer. Outline the process you take to write captions and decide hashtags. Make a list of geotags you use and those that you don’t. Write out how you respond to comments and if you use emojis. Be as specific as possible so that you can maintain this same aesthetic moving forward. This is also a helpful guide if you need to hire someone new and they take care of this task.

Quick Tip

If you’re ever unsure whether or not you should post a picture, think about this simple rule; if you wouldn’t hang it on the wall with your other photos then don’t post it on your timeline. It’s that easy!

If you would like more information about how to develop content or build a following for your brand, contact us directly.