Lessons

Lesson Info

Example: Social Media Post Design

So next we wanna jump back into some examples that I already pre-made relating to social media. So maybe, even if you don't work in social media, you still probably use social media. And sometimes you're just posting something for fun, sometimes maybe you're posting something on your personal Facebook that you want people to take action on. For me, I travel a lot. And so I will often post on my Facebook hey guys, I'm traveling, does anyone wanna rent my apartment? And honestly, I have spent probably 20 minutes formatting this post, rewriting it, to why? 'cause I want someone to rent my apartment and they're only going to do that if they see the post and to see the post it needs to stand out in the newsfeed, it needs to be readable, it needs to catch their attention. And we can do that with design and in this case we're not using Keynote or Pages or Photoshop or anything, we're just arranging words on a page. So back to the bakery example though 'cause we're still not done with these gu...

ys. (chuckles) Let's imagine that the bakery is posting about some upcoming Fourth of July specials that they have happening. So I wanna give you a few seconds to just read this and then I'm gonna quiz you on what's happening at the bakery. Okay, times up, because in reality you're not looking at it for that long ever. You're not. You probably looked at it for half a millisecond. And so let's jump back to it though. So, they're trying. The bakery's trying to be all cool and social. And so let's look at the message they're trying to send in this social media post. So it's Fourth of July, do you need last minute treats for your celebrations? They have a bunch of limited-time cupcakes that they're releasing. So this is important detail, next week only. And they're going to be doing these three new flavors, they're telling us the flavors, red velvet cream, red velvet cream cheese, apple pie, rocky road, chocolate. And if you wanna get fancy, you can do the DIY cupcake decorating kits because that is new this year and you want those for your kids so they're out of your hair. So in each of these kits you get these ready to decorate cupcakes with all these things. So notice, there is a ton of information in this post that you would not get at all unless you are scrolling through your phone and you literally stop and read every work. But no one's reading every word, therefore people see this and a large percentage of people are not going to know you're doing anything for Fourth of July, what those flavors are, or that you have some DIY kit that they might actually be interested in. Now, second paragraph is a little bit better because they're giving their hours, which is great, so that maybe we might pick that out if we were really reading this fast and that's about it. So the goal here is to think about if I was in charge of writing these Facebook posts, how do we make this more readable, more scannable, so that people know we're doing something for Fourth of July, there's these awesome new flavors, and we have these DIY things? And by the way, we're having these special hours next week. So before I design this, I'm thinking about the content which I just did. I read the paragraph and I picked out the most important information I feel like if I needed to write headlines for this, that's what I would kinda be writing. Those are the points I need to be making. So this is just one implementation of this, we could do this many, many other ways and actually I have a few other examples. But, emojis, love them or hate them, they're a great visual cue to get people to understand what is going on and catch their attention. American flag, it's Fourth of July, got it. But also what are we doing in addition? Just quickly glancing this if you were on your Newsfeed, American Flag, got it. This might stand out to you, flavors, red velvet (hums). Okay great, we used some cute emojis. Oh, there's a hammer and wrench, I don't even know what that's called, but DIY. So you get some details about the DIY and then more about the Fourth of July. So even though we haven't read this yet, we get the gist of what's going on. And then, thinking about how we use different ways to deal with fonts, not fonts, laying out text and things, we're chunking this out. So it's no longer one mashed up paragraph. We've got little intro here, we have the flavors, here are the three flavors. It's chunked out. I wish there were a better term for this, but this is the best I've got today. So you'VE chucked it all out and instantly people can get a gist of Fourth of July coming up, flavors, some special DIY thing, how to get our hands on this. And if you were to do testing and watch people, if I had someone right beside and I was watching them scroll through a newsfeed and this showed up and this showed up, they would scroll right past this and (chuckles) they would, gotta go forward. and this would be able to catch their eye a little more. Hopefully you can see the difference between those two, but another way to do this would be to add images. You've seen stuff like this before, but images can just convey so much more. And on Facebook we would click in and then the comments or description of that photo could probably just have all that. But the point is you have to think of the context. Remember, we talked about earlier? You have to think of where people are consuming this, what device are they on, are they walking down the street, are they standing in line, what are they doing? So using an image could help suck them in more and then they could click on that, especially even just these little arrows. Like it sounds crazy, but those could just be a little visual cue, look at this, look at me, click to see our special holiday flavors. And then because I saw an ad like this the other day for something unrelated and I clicked it and then I went into it and, woops, and inside when the image kinda blew up, it was kind of a post like this where they put all the extra information. So don't try and put all the information maybe on your main post, you could use an image and then have people click through and see the details. But Twitter's an awesome one too. So, Twitter used to be that glorious 140 characters and then they made that decision to bump it up and double it to I think 280, don't quote me on that. But the problem is I remember when they first bumped it up, it drove me crazy because people were just not putting any paragraphs. And I don't know if you receive text messages from people like this, but my mom actually will send me text messages and she dictates them and what happens? It's just a paragraph. It's like this long and I really, I literally have to read the whole thing to get to the gist of what she's trying to tell me. She's making me work to understand her message. So in this if Scout were tweeting this and you're scrolling through Twitter, you've already read it now, but if you were just glancing at this you really wouldn't be able to call out the key information here. But they're telling us the same things. Fourth of July special flavors, stop by to get them, here are the flavors and we have these DIY cupcake decorating kits. A better way to do that would be chuck it up, use some icons. And also we're able to throw in a link here too and whenever I have a link or anything, I try and use an arrow or an emoji or something to draw people's attention to it. But you could try to argue with me and tell me that this one's better, but I would strongly disagree with you. This one to me feels so much more readable, scannable, and even by not reading all this I'm getting a sense of like chocolate, apples, I don't know what, America. And I can start to form an idea of what this is about, but I would probably pause enough to read a little bit this versus the other one. It's too much text, it's cognitive overload, it's making me think and we don't want to make people think, we want them to just look and understand. So another way, this is still Twitter, images are awesome on Twitter. I'm sure you've seen this a million times. And then for Facebook, I wanted to give another example because a lot of times we're posting about events. And events are interesting, because there's so many important parts, right? Date, time, price, things like that. So maybe the bakery is starting to offer cupcake camps, where the afternoon where you can drop your kid off and they can do cupcake things, whatever that is, and then you can go and enjoy a nice cocktail and brunch and the bakery's like basically a glorified babysitter. But, if you were scrolling through Facebook, you wouldn't really get the gist of that because all of that information that I just told you is jammed into this claustrophobic paragraph. A better way to do that would be to break it up, create clear zones, use headlines. Even though we're not able to bold things on Facebook, you could imagine this is not on Facebook and this is an email you're sending to your colleagues asking them to come to some meeting or something like that. It doesn't always have to be this giant rambling paragraph like this. If we break it up and we think through what are the key parts of this message we're trying to give people, then we can display it in a way that's a lot easier for people to understand. So if we were scrolling through, we would see these different sections. So this summer we're launching blah, blah, blah. We're thinking this is going to sell out, here are the details. Maybe if I never read that, that's fine. When I see when, time, who, those are creating cues for me to know oh, this is an event, something's happening. And then I can quickly scan this and grab that information. There is no way if I said to you what day is the cupcake thing on or how much does it cost, it would take you a while to figure that out from this. Whereas if I said how much does it cost here, hopefully I put the price, yes, right down there, but also maybe I should've put a price dollar bill emoji or something like that to again, call it out. Also, you can tell if you're really reading these you can throw a lot of personality into this depending on the emojis and things like that. But great way to help people understand your message and hopefully take action, because people are just overloaded when they get these really jammed together messages that look like something like this. So next time you post something for your business, something for your personal, when you write an email to someone, I just wrote a tweet about this a couple of days ago. Someone sent me an email and I actually cut and pasted it into a document 'cause I wanted to see how long it was, it was 3,000 words long and it was just kind of like all together, a big giant thing. And I kinda went on this Twitter rant like before you send an email, look back at it. Is it big huge chunks of paragraphs? Is there any white space? Are there headlines? I honestly will spend like 10 minutes formatting an email to make sure that if it's a meeting, okay, we could quickly go back and see okay, here's the agenda, here's the time, here's the Zoom or Skype link or whatever it is. And it sounds ridiculous, but if you don't want to end up with people for example if you've emailed colleagues about a meeting and you don't make those details clear, then what's going to happen? Everyone is going to come email you or text you when's that meeting, how's it happening? Blah, blah, blah. Even if the information's already in the email you sent them, you made it so hard for them to find that information that they are lazy, 'cause people are lazy, and they're just gonna ask you. Similar to this I bet if Scout did something that, woops, is kinda like that I bet they would get a lot of Facebook messages, well how much is it, where is it, when is it? Things like that. Even when I send out my own email newsletters for different things, if I'm teaching a class or something holding office hours, I spend so much time making sure, especially this is a favorite, I say yes, this class will be recorded and you'll get a recording afterwards. And I try and make it as obvious as possible, I put bolds, I use emojis. Without fail people still reply and say is this going to be recorded? And that's just an example. Try and make these details that people may ask you for in the future obvious so you don't have to waste time replying to everyone individually.