Social Media Practices
As a graphic designer it’s important to show anybody who may hire you that you can brand yourself before you start branding others. An important step in building a brand for yourself is setting up social media accounts and getting some outside eyes on your work. When trying to make successful social media accounts as a graphic designer, there are some key steps you should take to put yourself out ahead.
- Post content that you’re proud of.
If you aren’t proud of something you’ve made, you don’t need to post it, even if it was a successful design. Building your brand is about how you want to be seen by your audience, so post content that meets your own personal standards.
- Don’t just post projects you’ve made for clients.
Posting content that you’ve designed for your clients is fine, but it’s not always representative of your own style, posting designs that you’ve made for fun or for yourself can show a different side of your portfolio that can sometimes be lost.
- Analyze your posts engagement rates.
When you’ve first started posting make sure to follow carefully what’s working with your content. Each of your posts will have different engagement rates and figuring out what content is more successful will help you figure out what to post. Noticing trends is an important skill and once you can figure it out you can start to grow your audience organically.
- You don’t need to only post your designs and art
Even though you’ve established yourself as a designer, don’t restrict yourself to just posting your own graphic design. You can also share others designs that inspire you, which can in turn give your audience a look at what you find interesting in the world of design. You could also make posts that don’t feature any designs, maybe an announcement post to get an important message to your audience.
- Post often and regularly.
You need to post often if you want more eyes to get on your profile. Starting out there will only be so many eyes on your posts, so getting a lot out there will increase the amount of works you have out there for people to see. Posting regularly will also help with engagement rates once you have some audience built up as they can expect when you’re going to post.
- Don’t be afraid to interact with your audience.
Responding to comments is a great way to make people feel more connected to you and your brand. While you don’t need to respond to every comment, you should respond to comments somewhat regularly while being sincere and genuine with your responses.
- Add any relevant hashtag to your post
Hashtags are an easy way for your posts to get discovered. While it doesn’t guarantee that eyes will get on your posts, without hashtags your posts will be almost impossible for people to find, especially if you’re starting off with an unestablished brand.
- See what others are doing
Look at what other successful graphic designers are doing on their accounts, it can not only inspire your own posts, but also let you in on trends that might be emerging for you to ride the popularity wave of. It’s a great way to get a pulse on the community.
- Understand your platform
What works on Twitter, most likely won’t have the same engagement rates on Instagram and vice versa. The same thing can be said for any social media platforms, so it is important to understand the platforms you are using and taking advantage of those differences between platforms.
- Embrace social media
If you go into building your social media account with purely numbers in mind, you’re probably not going to enjoy it, as well as not get the most you can out of social media. If you have the right mindset with social media, and enjoy what you’re making, it’s most likely going to show in your posts, and it will get more of yourself across to your audience. You don’t have to fake a persona, but don’t go into social media without putting your personality into it.