Chapter 4: Social Media is King
Selecting a content style and strategy is a critical first component of making a statement on social media. As you’ll see us continue to mention, consistency is everything when it comes to branding. However, it’s important that consistency doesn’t just apply to the posting of content, but its creation as well. When thinking about a content strategy, be sure to take into account your production needs. If you spend an entire week and hundreds of dollars on a video that fits your style, that’s not much of a strategy. Your chosen content strategy needs to be easily replicable, with options for contingencies. If you have a family vacation or get sick, can your content still be produced consistently? If your editor loses some footage, can you recover and still post the next day? We like to build content strategies around types of content that are easy and low stress to produce, mixing in high value videos and productions when appropriate or available. Better produced content can usually do better on social media, but it's not practical to base your entire style around one great video.
It’s important to think about your content from a holistic perspective. Use colors and hues in your images and videos that accurately portray the feeling of your brand and brand assets (logo, profile picture, banners). If your company sells items related to a winter sport, make sure your content doesn’t reflect the idea of spending time on the beach in the summer (warm vs. cool colors). Think about your captions and hashtags, are they relevant to the content? Do they follow a consistent tone and message? If you can’t draw an overarching brand theme from a handful of captions, you need to reevaluate your copy. We’ll discuss this further in the coming modules.
Another thing to keep in mind is to not over utilize text in your photo or video posts - that’s why captions exist. It can be tempting to post flyers or other text-heavy content as an image on your social platforms, but this is a big mistake. It will break up your consistency, and will almost certainly underperform compared to your other posts, having an adverse effect on any momentum your social media accounts had built up to that point.
It’s important to establish and maintain a certain level of quality when it comes to the content going up on your social feeds. Posting poor quality creative (photos, videos) on your social accounts will not only have a negative impact on your organic engagement, but will detrimentally affect any paid ads as well (more on this later). At the risk of becoming redundant, consistency is everything. Posting a shoddily edited video will have negative effects on your brand image.
On social media, the time frame to grab your audience's attention is a matter of milliseconds. Your content must be eye-catching at a glance, mid-scroll. Here are a few technical guidelines to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck out of social media posts:
On Instagram, make sure to crop your post vertical for maximum attention grabbing potential. For videos/reels, use a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio. For photos, use the dimensions 1080px x 1350px
For TikTok, always use 9:16 vertical video format
The point of this is to take up as much space on the screen while somebody is scrolling as possible. Horizontal posts take up hardly any vertical space in the feed, and are way easier to miss if somebody is scrolling quickly.