Everybody with a consistent social media presence for their brand or business knows that it is essential to keep audiences engaged. After all, sharing content on social media doesn’t produce inherent value if people aren’t clicking, liking, sharing or otherwise engaging with it. Given many social networks often nerf visibility for brands that do not engage consistently with their audiences, maintaining this balance is crucial.

Visual content is easily the best form of content to share with audiences if you’re looking for likes and shares specifically. Yet maximizing the appeal of your images and videos takes a bit of practice. Let’s look at what you can do to make that a reality.

Simplify Your Content Categories

Every piece of content you share on social media should fall into one or more categories. All too often, brands make the mistake of sharing content without a clearly defined category structure or incorporating too many different types of multimedia content. Rather than pinging noise at your audience that can seem random, structure your content around several key groupings.

This can be anything from Throwback Thursday and promotional posts to giveaways and live streaming content. These categories can be easily structured depending on how reliant your brand is on one form of multimedia or another, but even with a mixed content portfolio, simplifying your content categories into a few key examples (and adhering to it with each post) can make your scheduling of content and its reception better.

Optimize for Each Platform and Device

There are many social media networks to consider promoting your brand through, but they all have unique considerations. Arguably one of the biggest is the size of your images and other multimedia: dimensions can be different between Facebook and Twitter, as well as Instagram, Pinterest and others.

Ultimately, this can have a huge impact on branding and logos, but can almost impact how much of a standard image-based post somebody sees at first glance. Knowing what default dimensions are used by each platform can help you to better shape each image to be as visible as possible from a user’s feed.

It’s also vital to consider that many posts can look different depending on whether somebody is using a traditional desktop or laptop, or a mobile device. Keep this in mind as well when optimizing your content.

Create Unique Multimedia

Ultimately, social media presences cannot survive merely by sharing the content of others. You need a fresh, steady supply of content. Many focus on the need to create blog posts and other content that links to websites: while this is absolutely needed, the same advice applies to images, photos and video, too.

To avoid pinging noise at your audience by sharing content they’ve already seen elsewhere, dedicate time into cultivating the use of images and videos that are customized and unique. By doing so, you’ll give audiences a reason to engage with your content; after all, if you’re sharing the same images that other brands are sharing, the number of people who will engage with yours (as opposed to theirs) is inherently smaller.

Upping the ante for your social media performance is easier said than done, but focusing on improving the visual quality of your content can have a huge impact. By creating custom multimedia, adhering to specific content categories and optimizing for each platform and device, audiences will find greater purpose and more appeal in the content you share.