Patient Advocacy: 6 Tips for Making A Visual Impact on Social Media

Patient Advocacy: 6 Tips for Making A Visual Impact on Social Media

When it comes to sharing your advocacy message visual impact is a key factor in creating more visibility for your cause and increasing online engagement. In an increasingly crowded digital landscape, where our minds are drawn more readily to content that catches our eye, images can break through the online content clutter to quickly communicate your message.

It stands to reason that the visuals you create and share online should set the right professional tone for your advocacy activities. To help you do this, I’ve put together a list of six tips to increase the visual impact of your social media posts, alongside a list of tools to help you create more professional-looking graphics.

1. Upload A High-Resolution Image

Upload larger high-resolution images to social media. When an image file is too small, it will stretch, resulting in poor image quality and pixelation. Pixelated images appear unprofessional and reduce the likelihood they will be shared by others.

2. Choose Clear Typography

Typography is made up of elements such as font type and size, kerning (white space between individual characters or letters), and tracking and spacing. Typography is important when it comes to making your content more understandable to your reader. Visit Google Fonts directory, a free tool to help you choose the best font for your graphic design.

www.fontsgoogle.com

3. Pick The Right Colors

Color design is an essential design element. Ask yourself if your color choice is easy on the eye. If you use a combination of colors do they complement each other? Complementary colors are those that are placed opposite to each other on the color wheel.

Keep your color palette simple. Don’t be tempted to use too many colors in your designs. Pay attention to the hue and saturation values of the chosen colors – lightening or darkening tones to convey more warmth or strength as needed.

Consider how color can elicit emotion, which can result in either negative or positive feelings. A vibrant red, for example, makes a design element more stimulating and is good for drawing attention, such as for a call to action button. Red, on the other hand, can have more negative connotations – red for danger. It’s also a difficult color to see, especially for those who are visually impaired. If you choose to use red in your designs do so sparingly and intentionally.

4. Make Good Use of White Space

This tip is all about learning to embrace white space in your design template. Make use of grids when laying out your design. Layout grids help designers position text and images in a way that looks coherent and easy to follow.

5. Adapt Your Images To Suit Each Social Platform

No one post fits every platform. Each social network has its own dimensions and your design needs to be adapted to fit. An image creation tool like Canva makes it super easy to create your image according to the dimensions of your chosen social channel.

6. Avoid Using Stock Photos

The best images to create connections online are authentic images. Try as much as possible to use your own photos and images in your design. That’s not to say you can’t ever use stock images, but be mindful of not turning to over-used, cheesy stock images.

Ten Tools To Create Professional Looking Graphics

1. A Color Story

This app lets you choose from a large selection of filters to make your photos stand out. Instead of filtering your photos to look all the same, A Color Story filters aim to enhance the color you’ve chosen in your composition. One very helpful feature of the app is that it lets you save your editing steps to reuse for future edits, which will save you time when batch-editing photos.

Acolorstory.com

2. BeFunky

There is so much you can do with this tool to enhance your visual assets, including creating collages, adding “one-click” photo effects (there are over 300 photo effects and filters to choose from), and an array of graphics (e.g. speech bubbles). The basic account is free to use and provides users with access to a library of 125 digital effects.

Befunky.com

3. Canva

Whether you want a Twitter post or Facebook profile picture, you can create them quickly using Canva’s drag and drop editor. Select from a number of pre-set designs, or create something from scratch.

Canva.com

4. Easil

Easil is an online graphic design tool with pre-made templates that you can adapt in seconds with simple drag-and-drop tools. It’s especially useful for Instagram and Facebook stories.

easil.com

5. Infogram

Infographics are a great way to present your data in a creative way and this free design tool makes it super simple to put together your own infographics.

Infogram.com

6. Life of Pix

Life of Pix offers free, high-quality images that are available for personal and commercial use. Each comes with a helpful color palette so you can plan your visuals accordingly.

Lifeofpix.com

7. Quotes Cover

Quotes Cover turns quotes or short text into images for social media and high-resolution images for posters or other print designs. It’s so simple to use. Simply enter your quote or text and then choose your preferred design elements, such as font, shadow effect, and color.

QuotesCover.com

8. Ripl

A mobile app that lets you create short animated videos with professionally designed templates. Ripl is integrated with the major social media platforms, so sharing your final video is easy. Once you’ve connected your social profiles to Ripl, you can post directly to Facebook, Facebook groups, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. You can export your videos if you want to use them outside of your social media platforms.

Ripl.com

9. Typito

Typito allows you to make video content using its drag and drop tool, and add images, music and captions. Once you create your video you can export it into several formats, including landscape, square, etc. — giving you perfectly cropped videos for the platforms you use the most.

Typito.com

10. Unsplash

Unsplash gives you access to a bank of 50,000+ free-to-use photos. You can subscribe to receive ten new images every ten days directly into your inbox.

Here’s to your social media success!