How To – Up your Social Media Branding Game

For those of you who don’t know, my ‘day job’ is a designer. I do all sorts of design – CAD, Graphic and Web are my main areas of expertise. Because of my job, I think it’s really important that my blog, social media, including Instagram followers, and YouTube Channel look as slick as possible. Obviously, I spend a lot of time making everything I create for my clients looking as good as I can, I sometimes forget to keep on top of my stuff. It’s not so bad, because I don’t think that anything of mine looks bad, by any stretch. However, there’s always room for improvement.

If there’s something out there to make my life easier, I’ll definitely look at it. For example, I can code in HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript, but I’ll use a pre-made theme for WordPress when it comes to working on a new website. It might feel like a bit of a cheat, but – when someone has done the bulk of the hard work, and I can use my skills to tweak it to my liking – I think that’s fine. Something that I like to do, is keep my channels looking roughly the same. At the moment I use a photo grid across my socials for the header. I made this by hand in Adobe Illustrator. I picked out some of my favourite photos, and put them into squares, so it looks a bit like an Instagram feed.

The thing is, each social network has a different sized header. So, what might look great on Facebook won’t work on Twitter, or YouTube. So I had to work out the optimum layout for each template, which was time-consuming and frustrating. So, when I heard about social media mockup templates from Design Bundles I was over the moon and had to share them with you. So if you choose that bundle you get 195 different styles of Social Media Mockup.

Within each there are editable templates that meet all the requirements and are adapted for the usage on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Etsy and more. There’s 4560 templates in total – which for just over £15 is CRAZY! Once you’ve downloaded it, then it’s time to make some tough choices – find a template that works for you! 195 quite radically different styles and layouts is a lot to choose from! I liked No. 76

Obviously I’m not that pretty, or called Patrick Harrison! But that doesn’t matter – the download comes with PSD and EPS files so they can be easily edited in Photoshop or Illustrator. Within a few minutes Patrick Harrison is gone, and I have newly branded mock up.

So all that’s left to do is put it up on Facebook..

That’s better! I’ve even given my Twitter a bit of a glow-up too! Obviously you need to know a little about Photoshop or Illustrator, however, they’ve made it as simple as possible to allow you to make the templates as easy as possible to edit! So pretty quickly you can up your social media branding game and have everything looking consistent.Disclaimer – This post has been written in collaboration with Design Bundles.