Guide To Creating Visually Stunning Posts On Social Media For Greater Engagement

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey there. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard with my co host Tracy Hazard, and today we're going to share with you our guide to creating visually stunning posts on social media for greater engagement for your podcast. So, Tracy, that's kind of a mouthful. We need to unpack that.

I know. Yeah. The main point of what we want to talk about today is creating greater engagement. And the main thing that you need to do when you're creating greater engagement is to get to stop the doom scroll, right? To stop the scrolling, to have it just stop going through and having them skip what you're saying. We want to stop the scroll. We want to have a feed stopping post. Right. Like that's the goal of it. If we get that far and they stop and you've got great, valuable, interesting information, there's no way they're not going to engage at that moment in time. They're going to remember it, they're going to come back, they're going to follow you. Something is going to occur when you provide value there that's on you. And I really hope that you're not trying to clickbait people and you're really providing something of value. But that's not our discussion today about what you should have in that. Our discussion today is how to get them to stop, stop and take a look at it. And part of it is visual engagement. And so here's something really interesting I found out, Tom, because I'm teaching an AI lab to all of our clients and anyone who actually wants to join it. I teach an AI lab on Tuesday at 4pm Pacific Time and it's really been interesting and fun to talk to there. So every single piece of advice and everything I've been doing lately, I've been running through the chat on the side and just double checking and seeing what they say and if it's counter to what we say or if it's in alignment with. So I ran it both through this idea of how to get feed stopping engagement on your social posts. How do you make them visually engaging? And I type that in to both ChatGPT and Google Bard and I got the same advice from both. Exactly the same advice. But you know what? There's one significant difference that we do that I believe is the differentiator that makes the difference. The advice that is not common, it's not over branding. And that's the number one piece of advice that they're out there giving you. It's like number two or three on both of their lists, and that is make sure that you have consistent branding. Make sure that you have your logo and all that other stuff and your colors match and do all of that. And over the years, the number one thing we found is to increase engagement and stop the scroll, is to break the branding, is to break that over branding model.

This is one of my pet peeves, and it just comes from long hard experience of doing this in podcasting for. Gosh, how long has it been, Tracy? My goodness, like nine or ten years. Yeah, Long hard experience is typically branding experts will say every image to promote every episode needs to be the same. Your branding needs to be consistent. So much so a lot of time, all that changes about the graphic is the title, the actual text of the title. Otherwise the image looks the same. And perhaps if they're using a guest headshot, they would change that too, but otherwise it's the same. And whenever anybody scrolls through somebody's social feed or even your own blog feed on your website, if you're making a blog for every episode, every image looks like you just keep going, seen it, seen it, seen it. Because people don't read those words as fast as their brains process the visual graphic or image they're seeing. Isn't that right?

That's why we're talking about visually stunning, right? We want visual stopping. And it happens more on the image, the color, the branding side of things. This is actually the image. Now, I get it that brands are trying out there to create brand awareness and do all of that. But brand awareness is not engagement. And I want you to really think about that. And if you are a brand who has deeper pockets, you can afford to do that. But we don't have as entrepreneurs, as individuals with podcasts, we don't really have the big budgets. We need to do brand awareness campaigns. What we really need to do is get a client. We need to get somebody to buy our goods, buy our services, take engagement, join our lists, become a part of our community. Because we'll be able to then bring you in and take you through our funnel. Our next thing, whatever it is that we are trying to get the engagement for. Right. That's the most important.

Just get the people who are stopping scrolling and engaging to actually listen to a podcast to give it a try. Right. I mean, that's step one.

Yeah, exactly. So what we found over time is that mixing it up is critically important. It's really important if you're showing up in someone's feed on a continual basis and it seems repetitive. And that's what can happen with the over branding model. So here's some of our visually stunning rules that Tom and I have come up with. And really they're like the rule breakers, like the things you should do at the opposites of the rules. Right. Some of them are rules.

It may be the exception to some people's rules, but honestly, I don't think it should be. And it is kind of ironic. We're talking about visually stunning on a podcast where we're just speaking to people. Doesn't it?

Well, here's the number one rule of all of our podcast things. How do we get you off the podcast and going somewhere else? Right. Because that's what we want you to do. So I'm not sharing my images here, but you can find us anywhere on social media, Odatize or Hebinge Factor, which is my other podcast for podcasters. Right. For serious podcasters, you can go there and you can check out what, what we're talking about. You can see in my Instagram feed the variety that I'm going to discuss right now. So here's what we do. We say the number one thing that you should do, and a number one rule for us is to mix it up. Mix up your color from week to week and post to post your font size, not necessarily your font itself. You don't have to do the type size should change. You should create a variety. Sometimes maybe some words should be bigger than others. Change the font color. That's critically important too. So you might change your background color. Color, your font colors. Play with the color value because that is the biggest deviation from your brand that you can create, but it's also the most impactful and important. And so this is where we want you to mix it up the most. Because color is one of the first things that we take in when we see something. It's what makes something stand out in an environment. So if we're out there, we were foraging for food back in the olden days, right? Really olden days, right. We would know when something was dangerous, when something was fruitful. Right. That. So our eyes are very attuned to this and scrolling is no different than scanning a landscape. And we need to really think that through carefully. So color is one of the most important things we can do. Remember that color can evoke emotion, color can align or reinforce messaging. So think about your color in terms of is it reinforcing the positivity, the negativity? What is my message that's in this clip, that's in this post that I'm creating and can the color reinforce it? Can it also be complementary to my brand? So if it's something I really want you to pay attention to and my brand is predominantly blue, maybe I want this to be yellow or orange. So it's something that stands out and it's a complement in complementary color world to my brand colors so that it does stand out in contrast to my brand. But still coordinates. Right. So we can still come up with that. You might want to think about what those colors are ahead of time and have accents and compliments that are part of your brand guide for your overall brand so that they are pre approved colors. And it's not just any orange that people chose, it's the orange that you chose. So that could be something as well. The other thing is that there are colors that represent trends. So in a given time, in a given month, there might be a trending color that is happening consistency. And if your topic is aligned with that trend that's going on in the marketplace, don't forget to align your colors with that trend as well. So that's something to pay attention to. So colors are the main thing that we want you to mix it up because the number one signal that this isn't the same as the last post and it's not a repeat post. What's next, Tom? What is the next big area of visuals that we talk about?

Well, we obviously didn't coordinate this ahead of time. I would say it's either position of things or the actual what is the main focal point of the image of that graphic, which a lot of times we would use a unique image every time for our own post. Somehow in alignment with the topic that's discussed.

Exactly. The imagery is probably the next biggest thing. Positioning your right, that's important, but it's secondary because we don't compare side by side unless we're looking at it like on a blog post where you have all the blog feeds right in a row. But typically when we're looking at it in social media, it doesn't play with that. So the imagery is more powerful in the social media side of things. But the impact of that image is what's very, very important as the next thing. So color and then image secondary to that. And the images that we chose. Now, buzzfeed, there's a great story about buzzfeed. Buzzfeed is renowned for this. And of course buzzfeed's having issues and problems as a company, but that has nothing to do with what they championed and discovered. They would a b test every single little thing on an article. The headline, the title, the color, the image that they use. And so they're renowned for talking about article that they posted, which was one of their most viral early on posts. And it was about like the 10 fruits that are most chemically dangerous, right? Like they have the most chemicals on them. And so it was an article about.

Organic fruit, basically it was like pesticides versus organic.

Okay, yeah, yeah, exactly. And they tested all 10, because there are 10 fruits listed in the article. They tested all 10 fruits as separated images and tested which ones had the biggest impact and got the most clicks. That shows you both popularity of the fruit mattered, showed you that the color impact of that fruit, because they were all very colored. And it's the absolute fabulous story to me that tells you that making a concerted choice is critically important in here. And when you think about that image, you want to think about reinforcing the message of the article or the episode. You want to think about its color balance. Like, is it creating that impactful color on its own without those other color changes that you need? That's great. Can I make a contrast to the title and text that I use on this along with the image of that? So if I'm going with strawberries, right red, and then I pick yellow titles, they're going to have a great contrast between each other and it's going to be very eye catching. In my feed, thinking about how you can use those to the nth degree is one of the things that viral companies worry about. So if they're worrying about it, why shouldn't we be a little smarter about our image choices and really think about the reinforcing impact and visual impact of those. So a couple of rules over there, and this is the Same rules that ChatGPT and Google Bard suggested, which is higher quality images. And this is the number one mistake. A lot of times we take these horrendously bad screenshots or we have a bad camera. And I am guilty of that. If you look at some of the old episodes of Feed your Brand or the old episodes, my camera stunk because it was the camera that came with my computer. And also then it would go blurry because I would talk with my hands. So since I improved my camera, our feed has improved, our social media improved. We saw a significant jump in the improvement of the quality of it. So if you're using video and it's you on the video, make sure you're using higher quality. If you're using external images, pay for those images, get better stock images. It's going to make a difference in the quality of your feed compared to others. Or get a great camera and go take those images yourself if that's what they are. Right. A lot of great feed that have that.

If you have the ability to take original images or acquire original images, maybe from your guest. If you're interviewing a guest and talking about something relevant to them, anything you can do to have original images is always going to be a huge advantage. And it's pretty simple. Scroll. People scroll through the social feed. What's that? They haven't seen that before. I mean, there's an immediate stop of the scroll just when they haven't seen it before.

Absolutely. And when we're talking about this. So this happened just the other day. One of our daughters was taking a photo that she was going to share on Instagram and because of something that her hand in the air was blurry. And she was like, I don't want to put out a blurry image. Like, she thought about that in her mind before she posted it on social media. So we don't want pixelated, we don't want blurry, we don't want bad quality. But what she ended up doing was because the rest of the photo was really good. She put the graphic words, the caption like, like that. Oh, right over her blurry hand. It was perfect, actually, because she didn't have to like grade it and blur it to be able to get the caption to read. So it worked out great. So there are things that you can do to use images that may not be 100% perfect and get around that now, Tom. So we've got mixing it up in color, impact, fonts, imagery. Let's go with that. Positioning that, experimenting with formats I'm going to talk about. It's like, does your headline go at the top? Does it go at the bottom? Do you put a little graphic ingredient of your podcast cover art? What do you do in those things? Mix it up, try different things and really make it dynamic in how you're testing that, see what's working for you. But one of the Things that we always do when we create social media is that we have a rotating set of templates. So we do use this template variety. So impactful image goes here, graphic goes here, but every single one of us, one of them is mixed up for color and variety of position as well. So it also gives them the ability to say, well, I've got this image that is really a left side image, so let me use the one where the graphics are to the right or let me use the one where the graphics are to the top, because the impactful part of the image is at the bottom. So use those templates based on the imagery as well. It can really help you create the variety you're looking for and not just be like generically applied. Like, you know, so you can really make it so that it has an application to the image that you're using.

All for being prepared ahead of time, having some templates prepared, some colors approved that are intentional and not random, and switching up those templates from episode to episode. However, I would always recommend exercising some contextual judgment based on the image. It's like, oh, this is a great image. It really evokes the feeling I am trying to get across with this episode. But guess what? Yeah. The main focal point of this image is in the upper left corner. I need to think about putting some of the other text that's going to otherwise obscure some of that image elsewhere in the image. And if your template doesn't quite fit that, then it's time to. I'm going to use a sports analogy which men are going to be okay with. A lot of women might not like, but you need to call an audible right there and say, okay, well, that's template I was going to use, but I think I'm going to change it up and deviate from it so that I have an image that's going to have more impact and get that social engagement and connection and motivate people to click to find out more. So definitely those positions, those font sizes, like you're talking about those colors. Preparation's great, but what are we trying to do here? Get people's attention.

Right, Right. And when you're finding out something that works, don't do it exactly the same way every single time. Right. And that's what we're pointing out to you is like, when you find something that works, like try and experiment and move things around so that it doesn't look the same every single. So you don't break our number one rule, which is really get boring and have like, it being look like you've seen it, read it, clicked on it before, right? That's the number one thing we don't want to have happen. So when you're finding something that works, mix it up a little bit and the positioning and some of those things can do it. Color balance. So if most of your colors are light, try a dark now and again, right? Mix it up and really play with how you can do that. Another thing that I want to suggest to you in mixing things up and trying things is that I'm going to call it native tools and TikTok and Instagram and other places where you can mix with flying graphics, things that animate, little gifs like stuff like that that you can add on top of things. And you can even go to Jiffy and do that. So you can go to Jiphy and you can add in a like cursor icon or an arrow or a hand that's moving and pointing to things that are critically important. Try some of those things and see what happens. Just mixing it up every so now and again. But trying the native tools are going to see what's really popular. So if you try the tool right in Instagram, you're going to see what's going on, you're going to see the colors that are popular, you're going to see the music that's popular that you might want to put onto things. There might be some of those things that you want to test out and try before you go and reimagine your entire set of templates or in the entire way you want to do it. Test it out, see if it resonates with you. It might only apply to a space specific episode that has a certain feeling, a certain style. It might not be for everything. Like, I have a couple of sports episodes coming up and it's not a normal part of my theme to do anything sports related as a common practice. But it might be great to capture those sports podcasting fans by adding in a little of those animated elements. And you'd have the sound of a bat or something like that, or a ball flying through the scene, right? And really capturing somebody's attention to say, hey, this episode's about Yankees baseball, which actually it is an upcoming episode about that. So that's something that you want to do. And the other reason I want you to take a look at those is because they're mobile optimized, which too often our graphic designers design things on a large computer screen and forget what it's going to look like when it's tiny on your phone. And that's the way most people scroll through their social feeds is on their phone. So if you're putting packing too much in overdoing it, it's going to become apparent when you're using the tools and you realize you just can't cram that much stuff.

In another tip, I'd like to share Tracy, regarding all this is something we experienced recently with the image for an episode video that we had created. And it's really important to think about the context of where it's going to be played or how it's going to be displayed. And in particular, I want to share this about YouTube because there are some player controls and YouTube is often going to put ads on your video and skip the ad after a few seconds and then some other text. Do you want to watch it on YouTube versus on your website? It's a lot of stuff that can exist at the bottom of that YouTube video. And if you plan that with your thumbnail or any certain graphics on the thumbnail of the video, or even a lower third in the video, you got to make sure you test it out and you know how it's going to be viewed, because there may be a lot of other stuff you have no control over that is on top of the graphics, and that diminishes the impact of your message.

That's why you want to check out how it looks specifically on a mobile device and in the format that you're looking at. You don't want to just look at it and examine it outside of it and not look at it. Loaded into Instagram, loaded into TikTok, loaded into YouTube as Tom's referring to here. Right. Those things matter. So take a look at everything that you do from that formatting and then say, okay, now is this something that has been working and now should I standardize on it? But then let me create variety and let me mix it up from here. Let me take it and create a variety from that moment. Try that for a little while and see if you can increase that greater engagement that you're looking for, that someone to stop watch it all the way through and listen to it. So the last thing I want to touch on, Tom, is this idea of people's images.

You mean like using a guest image, using photos?

Right. So if we're talking about, like promoting this episode that we're doing our coaching call, there's images that go out with, you're in my picture and we have.

These like, oh, that's for promotion.

Yeah, right. But it's the same thing if you were promoting it after the fact. Right. It's you're sharing this. So an option to doing, I'm going to call it visually impactful image is to do visually emotive views of you. You going wow. And there's a whole list of them. You can actually get a list of like all the visual emotions I should try for TikTok and there's a list of like 30 of them or something where you can try and there's wow and there's surprise and there's like disgust and basically you try to make your face do all the emotions. And so we have ones of Tom and I doing all of that. Here's the problem with that is that you're not going to do it actively for every single post. So you're likely to be wearing the same thing every single. So go for black or white in that kind of scenario. Change it up and then make sure that the background color that you drop in goes behind you. So silhouette yourself and make sure that that's going to happen. And put visually impactful. My team has failed on this. Actually. I just gave them a hard time about it because they made the background blue on every single one of these. Because our coaching calls are over branded in the portal that we use them in. But because we're also using them and sharing them out on social media, it's not good. And so I've gone back to them and said, nope, can't do that anymore. It's one thing for it to be visual identified and I want everybody to know very clearly that these are coaching calls in our event portal, but I really don't want that on social media. So we have to mix it up and play it up. But doing people's faces and images is great unless it's your own social media. Right. Why do I need to have beyond the video? Because there's 101 little short videos of you and me, Tom, in my feed and in your feed. But it's my feed. It already has a profile photo of me on it. It has that everywhere. It shows that I'm the one that posted it. We don't need more of those. And it's more likely to get skipped if it's got my image on it in my own feed because it still looks self promotion. Now that being said, it's a tip from me. We totally want that to happen and that's going to happen in the normal video clips. So. But if it's a static image, we don't need that now the place that we do need it is in a quote, graphic, in a shared graphic, in what we call ego bait within our company, where I have a guest on my show and I'm saying something great about those guests. When we have what we would call in the social media world a collab, a collaborative between two people. We want the two people's photos on there, but we want them to be more predominantly the other person, bigger on our own feedback.

And or equal size because you might only give them one graphic and you're sharing it with them and then they're going to share it on your feed. So maybe they don't want their picture so big on their own feed. Right. So we want to keep an equal sizing on that. So thinking about these collaborative style images, we want to have that other person's image in our feed and do we want ours alongside with that? Great. It's an authority builder, it's a collaboration signal. All of those things are really great and that's the best place for it. But do we need our picture on every single thing and every single post that we do? I'm going to say no. I'm going to say no because it's our profile typically posting these things and it's our video that is being played of us talking about this tip in this thing. So does it need to be on the COVID thumbnail? Does it need to be on the graphic that's linking you into going to the episode? None of that needs to be there. Try it without it and see what happens. Now this goes again. This is one of those things that goes in the. Flying in the face of the branding experts, which means that it flies in the face of what AI tells you to do. But I am saying to you, remember that people are out there not because they want what you have to sell them and they're already like, oh, please let me stop and click on something that's salesy. They're not looking for that. They're looking for something to change their life, to help them. And when you're doing that and creating that impactful image, that's going to stop them for something they've been searching for an answer for. They are more likely to stop than they are if it's just. It's Tracy again, right? It's another. It's all about her.

Oh, yeah, who wants to hear her again?

Right? Exactly. Now, if I'm following her already, right? And I'm following a guru that I like, of course that's going to happen. I'm going to stop, but I would stop whether or not their picture was on the graphic image. I'm stopping because the social media profile that's posting it is someone that I actively care about and interested in. It doesn't have to flip onto the other side and be everything about them. And this is where the social media influencers, the social media advice that's out there is different than the advice Tom and I are giving you here. We're giving you that advice because this is what's going to get engagement to get your podcast listened to. And that's what we want here. That's our ultimate goal with the way that we give advice here.

Listeners are looking for what's in it for them. Why should they bother to click? Really? Does it help me? Does it help meet a need that I have? Does it pique curiosity, build anticipation? Those are the things that are going to get people to click and listen.

Are you talking about somebody that I'm interested in? Right. So your guest matters. Those things matter. So if we can reinforce anything from this guide to creating visually stunning images and posts on social media, it's that you really need to think about how it's received on the other side. If you want engagement, how is this looking to them? Is it looking self serving? Is it looking too salesy? Is it looking over branded? Is it looking like something I've seen, heard, read already? Then I'm not likely to engage with it. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of the receiver or the eyes of the receiver and really think about the impact that our social posts are happening on that side side of things. And if that is really how we want to be presented to the world, because brand is actually about perception, not about what we say we are. And that's what I want you to check here because I think the perception might be off and it may be why you're not getting the engagement that you're looking for.

All right, let's drop the mic there. Tracy wonderfully said you can find the blog post for this episode with links to things that we've discussed. Odditize.com There's a feed your brand section and what am I forgetting, Tracy? Anything else? Cause I think I did it wrong last time, didn't I?

In this particular case, Go check us out on social media. Don't forget to check out potatize everywhere you have on social media and go ahead and check out the binge factor as well because it's our example of how to do it in isolation. So if your podcast is all about is the only thing and you don't have another business behind it. Check out the binge factor and watch how I'm doing things over there because it's a prime example of things that you might want to try, things that you might want to do. The experiments out there for some best practices are always over there. So the binge factor and odditize anywhere on social media and go check out the visuals so you can see for yourself what it looks like in action.

Awesome. All right, thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next time with another episode of Feed.

You'd brand heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down? No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social unitedwipod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting, casting.