Reverse Engineer a News Feed Post

Instructions:

For this assignment, you will find a news feed posts and analyze them. After you have found the social media posts you would like to analyze, write a blog post (you can use any blog platform of your choice, like WordPress or Medium) which analyzes the effectiveness of theses posts and their design.

Please make sure that you use BYU-Idaho appropriate materials to analyze. Your understanding will be shown through a combination of writing and “draw overs.” A “draw over” is when you take an original design and use a program like Photoshop to draw over top of it. This allows you to visually show what you are writing about. Watch this video which demonstrates how to create a draw over: Draw Over Instructions. A minimum of three principles of design should be discussed.

Your post should include the following:

    • Introduction:
      Write an introduction to your post. Include:

      • the unaltered original design.
      • any background information to help set up the rest of the post
      • an introduction to the audience and how the post is connecting to that group
      • how are they using the seascape principles
    • Analysis:
      Create draw overs and write paragraphs explaining how the designer utilized three of the following (one draw over and paragraph for each):

      • contrast
      • repetition
      • alignment
      • proximity
      • color
      • typography
      • Composition
      • Fundamentals 
      • Lines
      • Layout
      • Golden Section
      • Rule of Thirds
      • Not Half
      • Swiss Grid
      • Custom Grids
    • Conclusion:
      Write a brief description of how the above principles contribute to the overall design.

After you have written and published your blog post, add a link to the coinciding post to your class’ FACEBOOK GROUP.

Branding Project Evaluation

Instructions:

Now that the project is over, it is time to reflect on how things went. Write a brief explanation of your experience, what went well and any areas of opportunities. This is where you will use the metrics defined within the ippie process you’ve written during the first week of this project.

Submit to iLearn

After you have written an evaluation of the project, put together a PDF with the following:

  1. First and Last Name
  2. Section, semester and professor
  3. Screenshots of branding from each channel
  4. An evaluation of what went well and what could be improved upon

7 Social Media Post Projects

Background

Nothing will kill social media branding efforts more than irregular posting. If you only Tweet once every few days or upload one new Instagram picture a month, you’re going to be forgotten. Shortened attention spans combined with rapidly growing social networks have made publishing more important than ever. How frequently you post is going to depend on your audience. It will take some trial and error to find out what works best for your brand.

Much of what drives traffic and revenue online is the constant creation of engaging content. The best brands that no one knows about doesn't do anyone any good. Conversely, a really solid plan but is garbage content isn't sustainable. The best situation is to create engaging content and a solid schedule  In this unit, you will be creating 7 posts for both of your channels and creating visuals to accompany each post.

Project Components

Captions

Captioins are the blocks of text which can accompany visuals on social media channels or stand alone. Writing an effective social media caption that actually drives engagement can really be an art form which is essential to get right. Your goal is to create meaningful captions which resonate with your audience.

Now you may ask if the same caption work across all platforms? Wrong. Each social media platform has its own strength and purpose, which means a unique approach is needed when writing cleverly crafted captions for your Facebook and LinkedIn platforms, not to mention those who have delved into the online marketing worlds of Pinterest and Twitter. And then there are #hashtags for Instagram. Look back on the begging weeks of the course to find best strategies for each platform you'll be using.

Word lists:

A wordlist is a brainstorming activity to help you create scroll stopping images. Scroll stopping images are needed in today's current seascape to stand out amongst the floods of content. To create a word list you will:

  1. Identify 3-5 themes, ideas or concepts for the posts you'll create.
  2. Write them on top of the page.
  3. Under each one, make a list of words or phrases (should be extensive)
  4. Combine a word from 2 or more lists and see what ideas you come up with to visually represent the combination of those words

A good wordlist should help you combine/create visuals in a new way to encourage your audience to stop themselves from scrolling on social media and check out your content.

Layout Sketches

You will need to create at least one sketch for every post. You may even need to create 2 different images based on the channels you are using. Sometimes the audiences vary drastically between social media channels and therefore require different designs. The sketches should show the general idea of the images being created, and it should also help you compose before you create.

Visuals

The visuals that accompany each post need to focus on stopping the scroll of your audience. This means they should be unique and not boring. Due to the different sizes and displaying options within channels, the visuals may need to be redesigned or reformatted. The visuals can take any form including, but not limited to, photography, photo manipulation, illustration, design, video, motion graphic, etc or any combination of those.

What is due?

Like we did in the last project, you will start to plan how you will succeed. Those who take the time to think and consider all aspects of a project before they start to execute will experience higher results, therefore, the first assignments associated with the project will help you identify and plan. Develop the following:

IPPIE Plan Write up

You need to develop a response to the first two sections of the IPPIE plan. This means you should identify key strategies to make your posts a success. Understanding your audience and how to connect with that audience is key. Therefore you should answer:

  • Objectives
  • What is the main clear message of your brand?
  • Who is your audience (define them here)?
  • What actions would you like your audience to take?
  • When do you expect your audience to take the action? (this should be more than “immediately”)
  • Seascape Principles
  • Which seascape principles will accompany your brand’s message?
  • How will the seascape principles connect with your audience and get them to take action?
  • Which taboos should be avoided when branding your channel?

Since you have now defined your audience and how to connect with them, now you need to plan the execution. Plan your:

  • Strategy
  • Who: what will you do in the branding project to connect with your audience?
  • Where: Do the channels have different requirements or taboos?
  • What: List each piece of content needed for the project and describe what each of those pieces of content will contain.
  • When: Create a schedule for the project. (Gantt Charts is an option)
  • Define Success
  • Decide the metrics which will best track the success of your objective/action.

Captions Draft

It is time to write a rough draft of each caption you’ll need for this project. This should be only a rough draft, but that doesn’t mean just an outline. It should have enough content to understand what the posts are and if you are using hashtags, be sure to include those in the draft.

Word List

Create a word list as described above.

Where to submit

After you have created your IPPIE plan, captions draft, and word lists, add a comment to the coinciding post to your class’ FACEBOOK GROUP. All three items can be included as one comment.