Social media is crucial for all types of businesses, and it’s one of the best ways to create a successful brand today. However, getting people to click your links and interact with your posts can take time and effort. Many elements affect the success of a social media page, and one of the major ones is the colors you choose. They can significantly affect the engagement of your posts.
So, how can you use colors to help you achieve social media success? Below are a few practical tips for creating a good brand across the most popular platforms.
1. Use Colors That Grab Attention
A lot of people scroll through social media casually, only stopping to read posts that look interesting. That’s why you must use colors that pop in your graphics and images. It doesn’t mean you should shove every vibrant color into one post. Instead, you should carefully choose bold colors that go well together.
One idea to consider is complementary colors, which appear on opposite sides of the color wheel, such as blue and orange or yellow and purple. Those colors paired together can make each other pop. Another way to create interesting contrast is to have a post filled with primarily dark colors and a focal point of bright colors.
Warm colors like red, orange, and yellow are high-energy, so they often catch someone’s attention the fastest. However, too many warm colors can be overwhelming and make the post hard to look at, so don’t cover your whole post with only warm colors.
2. Choose Pleasing Color Palettes
The best way to ensure your social media post looks good in advance is to plan a color palette. A sound color palette usually includes several colors that go well together.
Start with a main color, followed by a couple of similar shades and some other colors that accent the first one well. If you have a specific brand color, that should be the most-used color in your palette. Once you select a few colors, you should use that scheme regularly to help you create aesthetically pleasing posts.
3. Consider the Emotions You Want to Evoke
Use color psychology in social media marketing. Think about how you want people to feel when they see your content. In most cases, you’ll likely want them to feel happy, inspired, or intrigued. All those emotions are typically depicted by warm colors, with yellow making people feel joyous and orange evoking curiosity. However, depending on what your brand is all about, you could also try focusing on more specific emotions.
For example, if your brand has to do with food, you might want to use colors that evoke hunger, such as red and yellow paired together. If you’re promoting a relaxing vacation, you might want to use a beautiful light blue to help people desire calmness in their lives. Familiarize yourself with each color’s meaning to decide which ones match your social media profiles best.
4. Brand Consistency Plays a Crucial Role
Consistency is essential for a brand, especially when it comes to colors. If your brand has a specific color used for the logo, you should include that color in your palette. Your brand colors should also appear on every social media platform you use. By using consistent colors and themes with your posts, people will start to recognize your account and have a better idea of what your posts are about.
Your brand’s signature colors should reflect the message you’re trying to send or the product you want to sell. So, this is another good reason to familiarize yourself with the meanings and emotions associated with each color.
5. The Type of Post Should Affect Your Colors
While consistent colors are great for maintaining a brand image, your colors may vary depending on the post type. For example, if you have an autumn sale or a shop that sells special Christmas products, you could use red and green designs to indicate a holiday offer. If you need to make a post about a sensitive topic, make sure the colors you use are soothing to convey the mood effectively.
Plus, if your post’s “call to action” is in an image, use colors that help those words stand out. That way, viewers will clearly understand the purpose of your content.
6. Choose Colors That Appeal to Your Audience
Think about the age, gender, and interests of your target audience. Choose colors that appeal to the people you’re trying to reach. For example, research shows that women prefer softer colors or tints (colors with white added to them), while men prefer bolder colors or shades (colors with black added to them). Of course, those findings don’t apply to everyone, but they could be worth considering if you have a primarily male or female audience.
Different generations may also respond to colors differently on social media, so some colors may work better for teenagers and young adults than those over 60.
7. Make Sure Colored Text Is Easy to Read
If you create an image with text on it, bright colors don’t automatically mean the text will be readable. Certain colors clash, forcing people to have to squint to make out what your post is trying to say. A general rule of thumb is to use dark-colored text on light backgrounds and light-colored text on dark backgrounds. Those combinations typically make the text readable, but not always.
When designing your text, show someone else your sample post and ask them if it’s easy enough to read. Since you’re the one who wrote the text, it might always seem easy to read for you as you know what the words say. So, having a second set of eyes can help determine if you’ve made the correct color choices.
8. Cater Your Color Choices to Specific Social Media Platforms
It’s easy to post the same thing on all social media platforms. However, it may be beneficial to tailor your color choices to each individual social media page. For example, light blue tends to perform the best on Instagram, with pale pink and harvest yellow being other popular choices. Bright Instagram images typically do better than dark images, too.
On Facebook, people often prefer warmer colors like red and orange as focal points. Gold and violet are other popular colors. Even though blue is the color of Facebook’s logo, posts with lots of blue don’t do as well as on Instagram.
Consider which colors appear most often in trending posts on your platform, and add those colors to your posts if it makes sense. However, these tips are only suggestions, so if you’d rather use your own colors, you should, especially if you’re choosing colors to maintain a brand image or evoke certain emotions.
9. Keep Up With Color Trends
While some colors consistently do well on specific social media platforms, trends can change. Every once in a while, you may notice an increase in engagement centered around a unique color. You don’t have to follow every trend, but it can help to follow the ones that make sense for your brand.
For example, if you sell clothing on social media and a particular color is trending for posts about clothing brands, you may want to use that color. However, if your social media post is about something less fashion-relevant, like pets or sports, that trend may not affect your posts.
10. Look at Your Competitor’s Color Choices
Everyone needs a little inspiration now and then. If you’re having difficulty deciding what colors to use for your posts, check out what similar social media accounts do. Note which posts got the most engagement and see if there are any consistent color schemes among those popular posts. If specific colors seem to be doing better than others, it can’t hurt for you to try using those colors, too.
Of course, you don’t want to copy your competitors’ posts entirely. You want to avoid stealing their ideas or using the same color scheme as theirs because that’s unethical and could cause people to confuse your brand with theirs. Instead, take inspiration from certain elements of their posts and see if there are ways for you to incorporate those ideas into your own content.
11. Pay Attention to Which Colors Get the Most Engagement
Paying attention to other people’s trends can help you get engagement in your posts. However, remember to analyze your own results too. See if there are similarities between your best-performing posts, and use those colors to your advantage. If you haven’t seen any trends, test different colors in each post and see which ones perform best.
For some brands, color may not be the most important factor for social media engagement, but sometimes it is. So, be mindful of the colors you use and see if they influence the performance of your posts.
