Updating Day-to-Day Creative Strategy to be social first
For many corporations, their creative strategy for social media is dictated entirely by their marketing branding. On social media this usually looks like text dense content, a lot of static images that contain large CTA’s and website-style, very prominent branding. This approach inherently does not work as well on social platforms where users are looking to connect and relate with others or entertain themselves. One of the first tasks I was given by the Google team - was to start updating their social design strategy to optimize for social platforms, the brand still needed to be present but creative needed to change to better suite the platforms and their users. Below you’ll see some examples of strategic changes I have begun making in day-to-day creative.
Role: Creative Director
Worked with: Multiple agencies and internal design team
Shifting from single image posts to Carousels
Why Carousels?
Carousels. Using the instagram carousel feature has a super power - it will actually show your post to your social consumers twice yep that’s two chances to snag your audience. So where we would usually make a text or single image post - I started pitching creative that used a carousel format. The first two image frames are most important, and for different types of content there are different strategies but overall the strategy works beautifully.
Swapping static quote posts for Audiograms
Why Audiograms
A common pain point in corporate social channels is wanting to share quotes, ideas, and highlight users with text. Static text posts usually perform poorly compared to more innovative and dynamic ways to share content.
When opportunities popped up or new text graphics were requested - I started offering up audiograms as an alternative - audiograms videos that share an image of the speaker, are branded, and show the text on screen to read-along. They are a great way to humanize and share text dense content from podcasts, conferences, and video. When I started - there was only one audiogram up and running. Within 3 months we’d tripled that amount with more on the way.
Vertical version of the thumbnail
Square crop of the vertical thumbnail
Creating Social Wayfinding using thumbnails
Why require thumbnails?
Social platforms value and respond to videos that relate to the user or educates the user, and a LOT of content is generated and shared weekly. This frequently leads to a disjointed profile view that has a mix of silly and serious content. Not only does this miss a brand opportunity, it’s also hard for social users to navigate - finding the content that they want or relates to them from a profile gets a lot harder. This decreases the likelihood that a user will use the profile to “shop” for more content and can even negatively impact follows.
Thumbnails are an invaluable tool to make even meme content appear branded in a profile view. Thumbnails are not seen when scrolling through your own social feed - so they won’t make your content too corporate even if they’re branded, and they drastically contribute to having a consistently branded feed and wayfinding for your social users - encouraging them to consume more content from the profile view.
I started pushing for social friendly thumbnails for every video series, that showed the title, featured a large image of the actual person, and was optimized to look good when vertical videos were cropped to square. I also had us start sharing images of the guests in our videos, rather than just the same images of the hosts over and over again to keep content fresh.
Note: This project is still ongoing.