How to Keep Your Social Media Images Looking Fresh

Consistently posting high-quality content is the lifeblood of a great social media strategy. But it’s easier said than done.
Not only do you have to post consistently to gain traction, the content has be to timely, relevant to your audience, and engaging. Social media is for conversations after all, not megaphones.
Whether it’s a plane in the Hudson River or a crying boy hugging a police officer, social images are unique in their ability to communicate so much information in just a snapshot of time.
And social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest have built-in features to make it incredibly easy for users to share great images and spread them across their entire network.
In this blog post I am going to cover several strategies to keep your social media images fresh as well as 10 types of images you should try out.

Balance consistency vs. content fatigue

Why is ‘fresh’ content so important? Two words: content fatigue.
If you just share the same images over and over, your followers will tune you out. In advertising this is known as ad fatigue. Essentially, what this means is, when consumers are shown ads too many times and start to ignore them, making click-through rates fall and lowering the ROI.
The same is true for your social channels. Without fresh content, your engagement rates will fall and your fans will start to pay attention to less and less of your content, or every marketer’s worst nightmare: they ignore you.
The trick is to find a balance between consistency and fatigue. And there is no perfect answer for everyone.
Every audience is different. Some brands can get away with posting six Instagram photos a day and still have high engagement while others will see their engagement drop off after only two posts. At Buffer we’ve found that we can post 13 times to Twitter per day and three times to Facebook without seeing any significant drop off.
Make sure to periodically do some experimentation with the quantity of images you post each day, the results might just surprise you.

Develop a style guide for your social photos

Having a unique style is essential to a great brand and the same goes for your social media strategy. Consistently using the same Instagram filters, typefaces, colors, or visual cues can help viewers instantly recognize your content.
Everyday Carry is a great example of an Instagram account that has found a style of photos (knolling) that works for their brand. If you see a top-down photo with a phone, pen, & wallet in your feed, there’s a pretty good chance that it is by Everyday Carry.

The attention-grabbing copy with a consistent typeface and highlighted players with the black and white background make for an impressive image. There is also minimal copy in the Tweets, letting the images speak for themselves.
Creating a style guide for your social accounts can be massively beneficial when you have multiple team members with content creation duties. Every member of your social team should know the ins-and-outs of your style guide so there is no loss of quality when someone steps in.

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