How to create good social media content

I still remember the day a crop ruined a campaign. First job out of college. Nothing huge, internal event. But I was in charge of the campaign and it was big for me. Then Instagram shifted away from the square as the default vibe. Just a small change that made our headlines look like someone chewed the top off the text. Faces sat too low. CTA corners got chopped. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it felt like driving off a curb you didn’t see. We spent the next week rebuilding our workflow. New templates. A safe‑zone overlay. Everyone previewed assets on different phones and brightness levels. That week taught me a lesson I keep relearning in different outfits. Formats change. Attention is scarce. Details decide who wins.

Since then I’ve began my freelancing journey. I’ve made polished things that flopped and scrappy things that did well. The pattern that keeps showing up is boring and beautiful. Posts perform when they remove friction, make a clear promise quickly, and feel like a real brand talking to real people. Not a collage of trends. Not a Frankenstein of “best practices.” Just a steady system that respects how people actually use their phones. That’s what this is. A system you can steal, shaped by real work and a few bruises.

What makes a social post “good?”

Let’s define good so it’s useful. A good post is growth it earns attention fast without begging. It delivers a clear benefit or an interesting idea. It points to a next step that makes sense. It stays focused on one promise. It’s easy to read in preview and still looks good full size. It sounds like you, not a template pretending to be you. Good posts get saved, shared, and rewatched. Stack enough of those and you get compounding attention that turns into trust and eventually into leads.

Master sizing so nothing gets cropped

If your content doesn’t fit the frame, the frame wins. Platforms train scanning habits. Instagram trained us to care about the grid and the square. Stories retrained us to expect full‑screen vertical and a quick pace. TikTok and Reels turned vertical into the default and normalized on‑screen text, captions, and cuts every one to two seconds. Now Instagram is testing taller portrait stills at 1080 by 1440 to give photos more vertical real estate. LinkedIn still favors 4:5 and square because they claim more feed space without feeling spammy. YouTube Shorts stays pure vertical at 9:16.

What do you do with that? Build a living format bible. Not a dusty PDF. A single source of truth you actually use. Aspect ratios, safe zones, thumbnail behaviour, caption limits, how each platform crops previews, and any weird edge cases like how LinkedIn sometimes nips the bottom line of a caption card on certain Android screens. Design from the smallest preview first. Shrink your canvas to what people actually see in the feed. If it reads and makes a promise at a glance, you’re in a good place. Keep type and faces away from edges. Assume your viewer’s brightness isn’t maxed. Keep layered source files so you can resize fast when a platform tinkers with a size. This is unsexy work. It’s also the difference between “why did this underperform” and “of course this worked.”

Design for legibility first, and let style support the message

Most posts die in the first three seconds. Not because they’re bad ideas, but because the promise isn’t obvious enough for a skimmer in a noisy environment. We design on big monitors in quiet rooms. They scroll on small phones while riding a bus or half listening in a meeting. If your promise is hard to find, you will lose to a dog video that requires zero effort.

Make the promise impossible to miss. Clear shapes. A strong headline hierarchy. Generous sizing. Real contrast. One idea per slide. If you feel tempted to sneak in a second idea with a smaller subhead, you just found your next slide. For type, I like headlines around a tenth of the canvas height on mobile, body text large enough that it still reads when you squint, and line spacing that avoids cramped blocks. Test in bright sunlight and a dark room. If it fails in either, fix it. Treat poor viewing conditions as part of your design brief, not as an exception you hope won’t happen.

Make accessibility your performance advantage

This is the part people sometimes treat like a compliance chore. It’s not. Accessible content is better content for everyone. High contrast doesn’t just help someone with low vision. It helps anyone standing outside at noon. Captions don’t just help deaf or hard‑of‑hearing users. They help everyone watching on mute at work, on a train, or at night next to a sleeping baby. Alt text isn’t only for screen readers. It also forces you to summarize the point of the post clearly, which improves comprehension in the caption and makes the content more “savable.”

Here’s how I bake it into the process. I pick a palette that can pass WCAG AA contrast checks and I test real pairings, not just brand color versus white. Normal body text should hit a 4.5:1 ratio or better. Large text can target 3:1 or better. I run swatches through a contrast checker before I lock templates and I test on both light and dark mode screenshots to make sure dark overlays and gradients don’t sabotage readability. For video, I use subtitles that are large, high contrast, and not trapped in the very bottom where UI elements or captions can cover them. I avoid putting critical instructions only in an image. If text has to be baked into the graphic, I mirror the core message in the caption so assistive tech and search can reach it. I write alt text that states the main point as a sentence, not just “photo of a phone.” And I try to avoid color‑only status cues. If something is “good” or “bad,” I pair color with an icon or word so color blindness doesn’t change the meaning.

The punchline here is simple. The more contexts your content survives, the more people can consume it, and the more the platform learns that your stuff keeps people around.

Stay on brand so people recognize you before they see your handle

On brand is a feeling that repeats across visuals, voice, pacing, and promises. Familiarity lowers effort. Lower effort raises trust. Trust shows up as saves, shares, comments that sound like real people, and watch time that doesn’t fall off a cliff after the hook. That’s what platforms reward.

I keep a compact brand kit just for social. Three or four core colors that work together and pass contrast checks in the combinations I’ll actually use. Two type styles with simple rules for when each appears. Spacing rules that keep breathing room consistent. A light photo treatment so imagery feels like one family. One or two visual signatures, like a curve in the corner or a particular border weight, that show up often enough to feel like “us” without shouting. And a short voice note written in plain language that defines how we talk. For RK Growth it’s practical, optimistic, and no fluff. Constraints sound limiting until you realize they make you faster and make recognition automatic.

Choose content pillars so you’re never staring at a blank calendar

Random posting burns energy. Pillars turn it into a system you can sustain. I like four. Problems, Proof, Perspective, and Personality.

• Problems are the unglamorous fixes. A pre‑post checklist. A simple framework. “Do this before you hit publish.” It’s the content that helps someone improve a post today, not someday.

• Proof is the “this worked and here’s why” bucket. A screenshot of a metric with context. A before and after with the lever that actually moved the number. Not vanity. Mechanism.

• Perspective is your take on what’s changing and what it means. Not yelling at the clouds. Just context and direction. “Instagram is testing 1080 by 1440. Here’s what that means for thumbnails, type sizes, and click area.”

• Personality is the human thread. Small stories. Lessons learned. The behind-the-scenes of how you make decisions. The week the crop wrecked your campaign, and what you do differently now.

  
  

Once pillars are defined, formats pick themselves. Problems are usually carousels or short Reels with on‑screen steps. Proof can be one slide with an enlarged metric and three lines that explain the lever. Perspective fits longer LinkedIn captions or a tight talking‑head Reel with b‑roll. Personality can be quick and imperfect. With pillars, ideation turns from “what should I post” into “which lane needs a post this week.”

Prioritize quality over quantity without ghosting your audience

You don’t need to post daily to grow. You do need to post work that people want to keep. Platforms optimize for satisfaction. Saves and shares are quiet but powerful signals. Watch time tells the truth on video. A single excellent weekly post can out‑earn five forgettable ones that rack up impressions and disappear.

So define quality like a checklist you can actually use. Does the first second deliver a specific promise. Is there a small emotional hook, like curiosity or relief. Is the craft clean enough that nothing distracts from the point. Is there one clear next step. Save this. Try step one today. Ask a question. Grab the resource. Quality is not mystical. It’s a series of small, respectful choices stacked together.