One important aspect that helps to increase engagement with your content is the imagery you use on your social media channels. From Photoshop to Adobe software to Canva, there’s a handful of different ways to create this imagery and these are more affordable and user-friendly than ever. This means that brands are able to cut costs by creating content in house rather than outsourcing a designer. 

Imagery is incredibly important across all social media channels, no matter how it is created. In fact, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in your brain than words are * – imagine how much information you could get across to your audience by using effective and well-planned imagery, rather than firing a load of text at them. In addition to this, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, so by incorporating imagery across your social media you can really put across the important information you want your viewers to know about or learn about your brand.

Despite these figures sounding brilliant for increasing your engagement through imagery, it may not be as easy as it sounds. There is a loosely used term in the social media world – “the 15 second rule”. Users are said to spend no more than 15 seconds looking at a post on social media, however this number tends to be around seven seconds spent per post. That isn’t a lot of time to get across all the information you may want to share, so your content needs to be engaging. It needs to be what is known as “scroll-stopping” – people stop and spend more time looking at your post. This can be achieved by knowing your audience – what do they want or look for on a brand’s social media channels - and by creating fantastic imagery that can be shared across all channels.

Creating this fantasic imagery doesn’t have to mean hiring a designer, or buying expensive InDesign software. Canva is a free online design tool that I (and many other marketing and social media managers) have been using for years. By using Canva to create your social media imagery, you are really able to home in on building a brand image and create consistency across your channels. This can be done by overlaying your logo and uploading your font and by doing this your posts become instantly recognisable to your audience, and it allows your followers to associate your brand with the type of content you post.