The color is as powerful as any other visual element. Thence, there’s a psychology of color that applies in any visual field, and even it’s related to the sounds of each letter. Despite the fact that every culture in the world has different meanings for colors. Their correct use for a purpose, can make a message work or don’t. Although some people don’t even know about the psychology of color, every human being associates the meaning consciously or unconsciously. We record it in our brain, and our eye is smart enough to recognize it without over thinking.
It affects almost any decision we make in life. From our birth, our parents choose between girl’s or boy’s colors. We dress according to the color of our eyes or hair. We identify our political leaders with a party represented by a particular color. Even, when we’re meeting someone for the first time, one of the first questions we make is: “What is your favorite color?” So no matter what we do to deny it, it affects our biggest decisions like buying a product.
Thus, Social Media doesn’t escape from the color effect, and it’s important for you to consider when planning your strategy. In fact, every year there is a color trend ruling the world. Some of them make people share the content, and others stop people from sharing. Also, a dangerous combination between a background and text colors can make people don’t read quickly and dismiss the content. Therefore, we want to explain you a few things about how this element affects Social Media. So you can improve your work and enrich your team’s perspective.
It’s all about emotions
Does yellow make you feel the energy around? Maybe when you’re wearing red, it’s because you’re feeling sexy and provocateur. Every time you hear the sound of a wave, you imagine a deep blue sea immediately. Those are just a few examples of many we can give you about the emotions evoked by colors in our senses and mind. So why not to know the best colors to send the right feeling on Social Media? Of course, if you want to show joy, happiness, and tender, you have to play with yellows, pinks, and blues. Otherwise, if you commit to a serious message, you need to apply strong and electric colors.
Once you understand the power color has in our emotions, and how we can feel related to something just because of it. Then, you’ll see that your profile needs to follow certain palettes that represent your buyer personas. Evolving all of their characteristics, from gender to tastes.
Avoid color distortion
We present you this word “Compression .” It’s color’s number one enemy when it comes to Social Media settings. Sometimes, you may wonder why that graphic image looks blur or with noise when uploaded if it looked perfect in your editor. Well, compression is the answer. Besides, some colors like red tend to be more liable to changes when platforms like Instagram, compress the images.
Perhaps, you’re saving the document in a JPEG file and it that doesn’t work that well with such saturated colors. Instead, try to save it for the web in a PNG format which is accurate for graphics. Also, try not to saturate a lot the colors you use, to avoid the noise in your image when uploaded.
Why blue?
What if we tell you blue is the preferred color for building a Social Media Platform? You might be thinking that Instagram or Snapchat say the opposite. In any case, by now, blue is the most accurate color for SM platforms, and that’s why Facebook and Twitter stayed used it. It could be related to two significant meanings. Blue is the representative color for technology and innovation and is the one that makes people feel safer, calm and balanced.
Now that you know this fact, you can figure it out why they picked it, right? If you have these two meanings, people will feel free and safe to share any information. They feel good in an active environment being part of technology and social evolution.
What colors people share
According to the new Visual Content Marketing Trends, a Color Surge is what reigns in 2017. It means that the most color the better. Perfect examples of this, are movies like La La Land or Moonlight. If we want to take a closer look at what color surge means on Social Media, we can check The OA and Girlboss tv series accounts on Instagram. These accounts make a proper use of brilliant colors that make their content more shareable.
Between the most attractive colors that make people share contents are: red, purple and pink. We associate them with urgency, movement, passion, wisdom, respect, creativity, and they physically stimulate the body.
Black and White vs. Full color
After all this chat about how amazing multicolored posts are for your audience, you may be wondering: “What happens to the incredible black and white?” Well, first, it’s not over, and we don’t think that people can get enough of perfect black and white visual content. Although full-color images are creating a new atmosphere this year, b&w content is timeless. It represents memories, cleanliness of something, power, and elegance.
Color Surge is a calling from our new era, and platforms like Instagram understood it before, which explains why they changed their identity to a colorful logo. Due to a society that claims for diversity, colors are the expression of many movements that raise their voices through Social Media. According to this statement, it’s clear why we see a color explosion everywhere, and that’s something your team has to keep in mind.
Time for you and your team work in a better visual strategy keeping all the above in mind. We hope this is useful and you can tell us the experiences selecting colors for your content.
