How do you create a cohesive look and feel for the visuals in your social media channels? How do you create brand-friendly visuals to use for posts? A #socialmedia style guide may be the way to go. This Slideshare demonstrates how to make your social media visual style better, faster and stronger. (Like the Six Million Dollar Man - a 70s pop culture reference for the young 'uns.)

1. Building a
Social Media
Style Guide Like the
Six Million Dollar Man
By Carmen Shirkey Collins
Senior Social Media Manager

2. “We can rebuild him – We have
the technology. We can make him
better, faster, stronger.”
(That’s the Six Million Dollar Man, an old TV pop
culture reference for those of you young ‘uns
following along.)

3. We could make it better
 Rather than have a mish-mosh of images in our social
feeds, we wanted a unified brand look.
 We looked at brands that did it right.
 Oreo – for example. Yes, they get to market cookies, but
every post has a consistent look/feel and makes you want
a glass of milk and a cookie.
 Starbucks – for example. They get to market to people
with coffee addictions (everyone) but each post is clearly
on brand.

4. We could make it faster
 In order to respond to
trending topics and work
“on the fly” we couldn’t
afford to wait several days
for a visual.
 This empowered the social
team to create brand-appropriate
visuals in the
moment.

5. We could make it stronger
 Visuals performed 60-80% better than text posts.

6. We had the technology
 We love Canva
 https://www.canva.com/
 It was inexpensive (some
images free, some only $1 a
pop!)
 It was intuitive and templated
– drag and drop made
designing easy for non-designers

7. We had support from our
brand team.
 We worked closely with the designers
to make sure that we were representing
the brand, but in a social way!

8. The New Style Guide Included:
 A Canva font that closely matched our brand font
 Logo .png files in black and white
 Guidance on what types of Canva images to choose
 Hex colors for each of our products, both primary and
secondary. (These are easily implemented in Canva,
but, to make it even easier . . . )
 Background elements sized for each social platform to
drag and drop into Canva’s templates.
 PLUS some design elements (thought bubbles, etc.)

9. Better, Faster, Stronger
 The designers worked with us to show us what
templates might work for what messages.
 They even accounted for Facebook’s 20% text rule in
the template to show us how much text would fit!

10. Results
 Almost every post has a visual
 We respond real-time to appropriate trending topics
 Engagement is up! (30-40%!)