November 7, 2022
In the last few years, Dix & Eaton has ramped up our social media efforts to share content on a more regular basis as a way to showcase our culture and stay in front of our key audiences. This has manifested in greater engagement, increased connection and heightened brand recognition.
Interested in increasing your organization’s presence on social? The first step is identifying what parts of your organization you want to showcase. Do you want more product notoriety? Do you want to emphasize your culture to attract potential new employees? Do you want to celebrate the achievements of your current employees? Whatever your goal, once you decide what you’re going to focus on, you can turn your attention to what I think is the fun part – creative execution.
Below are three strategies that can help your team and designers create their best work from a look and feel standpoint, make it efficient and reap the benefits from a more strategic approach.
Templatize Recurring Posts
At D&E, our various reoccurring social media posts have standardized designs for each respective category, which allows us to be flexible and stay on brand. Creating specific templates for each category makes developing new creative assets quick and easy. For example, we promote our colleagues’ blogs on social media, and we have developed a template using employee portraits, a simple color swipe, some graphics and text. At first, creating a template will take time, but once these are built, developing unique creative assets should require minimal effort.
Your templates should be different enough to stand out, while still staying on brand. To stay organized, we suggest using photoshop or InDesign and creating artboards so you can see everything in one place and swap and update as needed with minimal files.
Test Video Content and Reels
Increasing our video presence on social media has been a major focus at D&E as various social channels’ algorithms have shifted to prioritize this content.
Specifically, Instagram prioritizes reels, as well as sound- and voice-overs, so we have been testing various video pieces on Instagram and reposting them on other channels to measure engagement. As part of our strategy, we aim for our videos to be less than 90 seconds to make sure that they are digestible and easy to consume on social channels.
When testing videos, it is important to try out different formats to see what works best. For example, some of the internal videos D&E has created in-house are more highly produced (like our ESOP videos) whereas some are more organic and contain spliced together photos and short video snippets from events (like our company Guardians outing).
Of course, generating impactful videos also requires having the right tools at your disposal. Things like having a mobile device with current video specs, an editing platform like Adobe After Effects and access to music that you can share are crucial for creating visually appealing and engaging pieces that will help your brand stand out.
The type of video that works for one organization might not be right for another, so have some fun mixing it up while you figure our what performs best for you.
Experiment With Your Brand Elements
Social media is a quickly evolving medium, so you have the chance to experiment with the look and feel of your organization’s brand elements while staying true to who you are. Sometimes pushing your brand’s limits and going beyond what you’ve done before can generate that “wow factor” among the audience you are trying to reach while also instilling pride with people inside your organization.
An example would be if your brand has circles and rings, you could think of ways those elements could come to life. How could they be animated? How do they play off each other? How could you use them to guide the story in transition?
Feel free to be bold with your content! Social media provides the opportunity to take dynamic shots, explore new perspectives and tilts, and incorporate creative video elements like swipes and transitions. The possibilities are truly endless, so have fun playing around.
Need another reason to invest more time and energy into your company’s social strategy? According to eMarketer, people spend approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes on social media daily, so it’s important that your content stands out while simultaneously reflecting your brand, your culture, and your overall marketing strategy.
If you’re not sure where to begin in kickstarting your organization’s presence on social media, let us help. From content to design, D&E has the experience to help you deliver social content that gets results.
Post amazingly – and don’t forget to follow us on all social channels!
