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?

Final Posts

By the second due date make refinements to your drafts. Get them ready to be published.

Publish a Post

You will need to publish at least one post per channel by the second due date. The other posts planned will need to be shown in the PDF being submitted. Every image should also be paired with the corresponding caption.

Comments

For this part of the assignment, go to your class FACEBOOK GROUP, find the coinciding post, read your classmates’ initial posts and respond to three different classmates. Select someone without replies (if possible), and do some of the following:

  1. Ask questions
  2. Answer questions
  3. Suggest other principles which may help
  4. Give more insight
  5. Help with Taboos
  6. Give advice or feedback
  7. Provide advice on comps

Affirmations such as “nice post,” “I like the way your sketches,” or “I agree,” “this was such a great draft. You’ve really understood your audience and can see that with your IPPIE plan. I don’t really have any suggestions, I am just trying to make this post long enough” are not adequate for this discussion. Be thorough and thoughtful. Your replies should start a conversation, not end it.

Submit to iLearn

After you have made comments, you will collect screenshots and other artwork, and create a PDF to be submitted on ILearn with the following:

    1. First and Last Name
    2. Section, semester and professor
    3. IPPIE Plan
    4. Captions Draft
    5. Word List
    6. Final Captions
    7. Visual Sketches
    8. Visual Drafts
      • screenshot of your expanded Facebook post comment
    9. A screenshot (from Facebook) of each of the three comments (expanded view) on a classmate’s initial post
    10. A screenshot of one published post on each channel
    11. A mock-up of 6 posts ready to be published