Social Media Designers: Combining Two Roles Into One Role

Graphic designers are key to several aspects of social media marketing. These graphics from designers such as the individuals in Delesign help to make websites attractive, provide the perfect graphics for blog posts, and create magical graphics for social media. Who are social media designers?

For a long time, we have been used to having social media managers and graphic designers separately. The world is becoming more dynamic and there is a need to combine both roles into one. We will look at how to achieve this in this post.

Who is a Graphic Designer?

This is a good place to start as it helps us understand the responsibilities of a graphic designer. The traditional graphic designer uses creative skills to produce designs for several purposes. It goes beyond print media to editing, animation, and graphics for social media.

Modern graphic design requires a lot from a graphic designer. Now, the designer has to adapt to several platforms to help in building brand recognition. These days, the job description of a graphic designer includes, but is not restricted to:

• Defining the scope of projects after discussing with clients.
• Employing photo-editing software, layout software, and digital illustration software to create designs.
• Present art directors and clients with design concepts.
• Review designs before final publishing or printing.

Looking at this, it is almost impossible to add the job of a social media manager to the mix. Social media managers have the responsibility of following trends, setting up social media campaigns, and producing content. To get the best of both worlds, you need the expertise of social media designers.

The Relationship Between Social Media and Graphic Design

Both have a symbiotic relationship. If one can master both, then the individual becomes the ultimate social media guru. This maximizes creativity and success in running social media campaigns.

Firstly, using top-notch designs helps boost the success of social media campaigns. It’s simple to understand this because you are more attracted to beautiful graphics before reading content. After reading, you want to share because of the beautiful graphics and content.

In other words, clean and creative graphics help to make the perfect first impression. Social media designers merge both clean graphics with creative content, ultimately irresistible.

This is important now that audiences seek more engaging content. The graphics make content more interactive and enticing.

Responsibilities of Social Media Designers

Trying to be as simple as possible, this role requires the individual to design original content and post them. Breaking this down, it means the individual needs to create content, design accompanying graphics, and post both on social media.

To be successful at this job, one needs to be creative, motivated, and know marketing techniques. It goes beyond being computer literate and design-savvy to having a high level of organization to match such skills.

Below is a summary of the responsibilities of social media designers:

• Creating content for social media.
• Setting up campaigns that will appeal to target audiences and increase traffic.
• Create pages, applications, and posts that will attract prospects.
• Build applications and webpages using programming skills.
• Using analytics to measure key performance indicators (KPI).

When you consider the responsibilities above, then the individual needs to possess the following skills:

• Efficient graphic design skills.
• Top-notch communication skills.
• Creativity.
• Proficiency in marketing.
• Possess self-motivation.
• Skilled in coming up with original ideas.

The Social Media Designer Solution in Present Day

The need for social media marketing presents us with a new challenge. One that requires the combination of two jobs, social media manager and graphic designers, into one. This means that social media gurus must now go beyond producing engaging write-ups to adding visual images as well.

As a result, as they create new posts, they are thinking about the best graphics to accompany their content. Therefore, they’ll need to answer questions like “what are the best images for this content? Should I add text over the photos? Or do I create memes instead?"

This new responsibility requires the individual to understand the social media space as well as the brand. There is also the need to possess graphic design skills to help achieve visually stimulating deliveries.

All of this begs one question, how do social media designers prepare in order to be efficient in their roles?

Transitioning Into The Social Media Designer Role

What can we deduce from the responsibilities and necessary skills above? Graphic designers can take on the role of social media managers and vice versa. Doing this creates the ultimate social media guru.

How can you make the transition? Some skills are difficult or impossible to learn. One such skill is creativity. However, both jobs already required being creative so the transition in this sense shouldn’t be difficult.

It is all about re-channeling your creative abilities. With this out of the way, you need to learn the ropes. For example, a social media manager needs to learn the use of graphic design tools. On the other hand, the graphic designer has to learn the basics of social media management and the use of analytics.

Companies that have either in their teams can help them make the switch by providing training. Anyway, it is far easier for the social media manager to take on the graphics responsibilities than the other way around. Here are a few helpful tips:

Learning to Use Design Software and Tools

This is where many of the social media managers feel a bit of phobia. However, you can learn from YouTube videos or read design blogs. These resources provide straightforward directions on how to use design software and tools.

Beyond this, it will take some extra periods of personal practice. After a while, you should become a pro at designing using software like Photoshop.

Using Alternative Design Apps and Websites

There are so many alternative design apps that social media designers can use these days. These resources help you to go around making design a lot more easily. They provide you with design templates, most of which are free.

All you’ll be doing is touching up background colors, adding text, or adding relevant images. Examples of such alternative design resources are Canva and PicMonkey.

Learning Social Media Marketing Language and Strategies

This will help transform a graphic designer into a social media designer. Since they already know design, all they’ll be learning is how to use social media properly.

Social media goes beyond posting images and videos. It requires an understanding of how to attract traffic, the use of analytics, and many other techniques. The individual can learn this via blog posts and YouTube videos. Continuous practice makes perfect in this regard.

The Ultimate Expert on Social Media

When creating posts on social media, it is important not to get lost in the shenanigans. It is very possible to get caught with only promoting services or creating fun content.

However, you need to go beyond all these to satisfy the need of your audience. Rather than self-promotion, you need to focus on creating helpful content in your niche. At the end of the day, it is all about creating balance by being engaging, creative, and sensitive.

Conclusion

A new era is upon us, one that calls for the hybrid role of a social media designer. The responsibilities placed upon the social media designer require ensuring the right person is hired. Delesign provides you with the convenience of choosing amongst elite social media designers for your business needs.