Creating coherent style guidelines plays an important part in producing top quality content. With the aid of a style guideline, you are able to achieve uniformity in all the social media communications of your company.

It also projects a particular image of your organization, to make it easier for the readers to identify with your brand. That generates content valuable both to the producer of the content and the reader.

Style guide and branding guidelines becomes a little bit tricky for social media. It is very difficult to enforce editorial guidelines around every post, comment, tweet and status update to name a few.

Thus, creating a social media brand guidelines becomes essential for the organization, more so, if a number of people are working on the social media platforms.

It’s important that we understand the value of social media branding guidelines.

If the strategy is ‘what’, then social media style guidelines are the ‘how’. They give a clear picture that how a particular Facebook post, Instagram image or a tweet are to be posted. The style guideline helps us to shape our execution thoroughly which in turns helps in our strategy to be successful.

Social media moves in real time and the pace of the posts is always neck breaking. To ensure perfect engagement, it is necessary to think twice and post once in order to remain on the safer side.

The social media branding guidelines help us think twice and act as the mold with which we are giving proper thought to the fast paced execution of posts.

Also, social media branding guidelines serve a different purpose altogether.

What happens when the person handling your social media changes their job?

Would the style and branding that person developed for your company and brand go with the person? This is where a well-documented social media guidelines helps a lot.

It serves as a blueprint for the next person who is going to handle your social media accounts and helps the new person to maintain the same style, branding and tone to your social media posts.

The 3 Basic Visual Components For Achieving Social Media Success

1. Consistent Color Palette

If you notice the colors used by any popular brand, you will come to know that they strictly follow a particular color format. If you look closely you will come to know that the color will be picked up from the logo.

Even if you look again, you will come to know that the images which they are inspired from will be of the same color as per the logo.

Adopt the same strategy. It is not a rocket science!

Pick up two or three colors from your logo. Using similar colors, you will be able to generate a high recall value of your brand and will help the viewers of your social media posts to get familiarized with your brand.

2. Create Color Shades For These Colors

To create a color shades generates an option for you to play out in your posts. To fix up that shades help designers and you to match the continuity of your own posts. Colors are the biggest impression of your brand. The more you play-out with colors, the more beautiful impression you get in the eyes of people.

3. Fix Up Your Typography and Fonts

Like the colors that you have selected, your fonts should also reflect the ideas and values that your brand wants to reflect. So always choose your fonts accordingly. Do you want a font that is strong or a simple font, a cute font or an elegant font?

You should choose at least two fonts. The primary fonts and secondary fonts.

Primary fonts – the fonts which will be utilized as heading of your post.
Secondary fonts – the fonts which will be used as body text.
Try to choose the fonts that have fonts family, so that you can have multiple styling options for you own fonts.

Create Social Media Design Templates

You know what a template is. That’s why you should use template format in your social media design too.

Social media is all about latest things, some time quick paced events. If you want to design the post and want to upload in an hour or two, the template creation helps you a lot in this.

The template also helps you take care of small elements in your image like the placement of logo in the image etc. In quick post creation, template become the easiest format to avoid any mistakes in design.

Branding Guide For More Options :

Every social media platform has a number of fields, branding options and something of their own where you can show your creativity and make the maximum use of your branding. So, a social media branding guide can be a great way to ensure consistency across all your social media platforms. Here are some of the social media platform components where you should be most careful about your branding :

About or Bio

About, bio or info is the field where you can tell your visitors and followers about yourself and what you offer. This is the most important component of any social media account as this is where you can impress the viewer with your branding and message. So, try to be as creative, authentic and clear in this section.

Naming Rules

A consistent naming style for all your different social media accounts will help to establish your brand and create uniformity across different platforms. So, by keeping the names uniform across the different social media platforms, you help to create uniformity and this helps in your branding.

For Example :
https://www.facebook.com/origzo
https://twitter.com/origzo

Profile Images and Cover Photos

Your profile images and avatars across different social media platforms play an important role in conveying the idea of your brand. it helps the viewers to identify who you are and what your company is all about.

In your profile pic, you should try to avoid stock images, try to use images that convey a certain meaning and avoid images on which you don’t own any rights. In addition, for each social media platform, you should keep in consideration dimensions, display contexts and auto cropping.

Tagging Protocol

For social media brands like Twitter, hashtags play a very important role to knit together content across a number of social media channels. Hashtags also help in content organization and discovery for both the content creator and the viewers. Hence, the use of hashtags is strategic and should be used diligently. Make sure that your hashtags are known to your audience and are easy to read.

Post Design Ethics :

Social Media Style Guide is Not Be Used in Isolation

You may have a world class social media design and branding guidelines, but if you don’t have other structures supporting these branding guidelines in place, you will not reach anywhere. Make sure that you have a corresponding web content branding guidelines in place and even style guidelines for your web writing. You should also establish proper training schedules for your social media managers so that they are in sync with your branding guidelines.

Thematic Connection with Digital Media

Just think for a while that you have followed all the points, you have set up your social media themes, but what about your digital design? The final goal of your social media is to move people to your website. If users are getting completely different design for your digital media, their faith will be shaken. Therefore, your digital design and your social media design must be in a sync.

For Paid Marketing , You Have to Compromise With Your Own Guideline

Social media has its fix design guideline for paid promotion. It is the place where you might need to compromise a little bit with your brand guidelines.

Facebook doesn’t allow more than 20% text area in post promotion. Therefore , to add these kind of posts ideas in design guideline reduce your stress when you go into paid post execution.

Break All Rules and Your Own Guide

Design is all about out of the box idea. Yeah, we have said that you need to create a rule for your design, but sometime great idea comes when you break the rules. So never worry to break your own rule for better social media design.

You can click below to download social media brand guideline for your reference.