Week 37: Our social media strategy
Spoiler alert: It isn’t a strategy at all.
Hey there, this is Harry, one of the founders of diesdas.digital, a Berlin-based product and brand development studio, with a team of six people.
This post is about our 37th week in business and today we’re gonna talk about social media. Why? Because I’ll be on holidays for the next two weeks and therefore the weekly posts #38 and #39 will be written by my colleagues … and since I’ve handled all social media activities up until now, I thought I’d summarize what I usually do each week and how. This was meant to be an internal document, but then I wondered: “Why the heck not post it publicly?”
So read on for a very detailed, very self-referential post about how we do social media. 🙃
Let’s face it: most companies’ social media efforts are abysmal
It doesn’t really matter where you look, most struggle with their social media presence and understandably so: Doing social media right is hard, requires effort, empathy and curiosity—but it’s not rocket science either! It’s a moving target though, with ever-changing platforms that provide different opportunities to express yourself, your company or your brand. We’ve been told that people like what we’re doing, so this week I’ll shed some light on our approach and process.
Disclaimer: This post is not meant to humble-brag … our diesdas.digital accounts don’t have crazy amounts of followers and aren’t super popular or influential. Far from it actually and we can do much, much better still. But especially looking at other agencies, I dare to say that we’re doing a decent job. So our insights might help somebody out there … if you ever found yourself in a “what’s our social media strategy?” meeting, then this post is for you! 😅
First of all: You’re doing it wrong if you have a “strategy”
One problem usually lies in calling your approach a “strategy”. Strategy implies long-term planning and an obligation to follow it, which is ill-fitting for a fluid and always evolving medium. Social media fundamentally presents a social situation (duh!), which requires a mix of good manners, cultural knowledge and intuition. Look at it this way: When you go out with people, you don’t follow a conversation strategy or a dining strategy, instead you improvise, being yourself. Most social situations are too complex for pre-defined strategies, so do yourself a favor and accept the uncertainty. That’s part of the fun. 😉
Social media is complex, because essentially you’re building an online character representing your company or yourself. Everything that follows in this post is therefore super specific to who we are as diesdas.digital and is not meant to be a universal approach. It’s ours. Yours will and has to be different!
The basics: diesdas.digital tonality
We are: Humorous and self-ironic, honest and transparent, curious and open-minded, leaving egos but not brains at the door, being approachable and respectful. These values and character traits should be transported through the tonality of our texts as well as the photos we post. It’s the common thread running through all channels.
The basics: diesdas.digital photo style
We aim to keep all photos we post in a similar style, which is especially obvious in our blog posts as well as the Instagram account. They are all taken with iPhones and retouched using VSCO cam for iPhone, always using filters E1 or E3, rarely E5 (mostly for outdoor shots). Additionally, all black&white photos use X5. E1, E3 + E5 guarantee saturated, warm colors, adding a subtle layer of friendliness to the shots. Similarly X5 is not cold and pure black & white, but has a touch of warmth to it.
On top of the filter, I usually do the following: Increase brightness by a few points, increase sharpness by one point, desaturate by 1–2 points and crop to a specific aspect ratio based on the channel (more on that later).
This ensures a consistent, recognizable style. You’re building a character through your social media profiles, so be memorable, establish a style and evolve it over time.
Pick your channels!
We regularly feed content to Instagram, Medium, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat and Facebook. Let’s talk about each.
Instagram: a visual diary
- Purpose: Show our office and people, convey a feeling of what it would be like to work with us.
- Procedure: Take photos throughout the day, decide on one to post, filter with VSCO cam, crop to 5:4 for landscape shots, square or 4:5 for portrait. Check that nothing confidential is visible; if there is, then retouch with Touch Retouch or a similar app. Import to Instagram, consider adding Clarendon filter at 20–40% (makes the image slightly crisper, but also colder). Tag all people. Set location. Write caption: One short line followed by an emoji to lure people in, then a paragraph with more information. Provide context, add an interesting insight. Close with some humorous hashtags if possible.
- Frequency: Exactly one photo per day.
- Room for improvement? We could be using video more (currently mostly an issue missing visual consistency), and obviously Instagram stories.
- Time required: Posting one photo (picking the best one, doing all edits and writing the caption) can easily take 20 minutes.
Medium: our blog
Oh boy. Here comes the big one.
- Purpose: Mostly a diary at first, summarizing what happened each week at the company, reflecting on the important things. Lots of people tell us they read our blog every week. Lately I try to find one overarching topic per post and elaborate our stance on it, to provide more value than just funny pictures, trying to make the the publication more relevant while keeping the light-hearted attitude. The blog has become our de-facto homepage and we frequently point clients to it, to give them an idea of who we are.
- Procedure: Take photos and notes all week. Sit down Saturday morning, make coffee, filter and retouch all photos. No portrait or square photos here, only landscape cropped to 3:2 to make them a little wider than on Instagram (occasionally there is a panorama at the very end). Start writing: Prefix headline with “Week XY: ”, explain who we are in the intro, add leading photo, then go into detail. Name our social media channels somewhere in the post. Proof-read, ideally also by someone else. Add links to mentioned people, companies or products. Add humorous or informative captions to photos. Publish and add to diesdas.direct publication. Then tweet about it (including the link and a photo), write a Facebook post to our own Facebook wall, add link to our Instagram profile, add announcement video to Instagram stories (not a real photo, because it’s the weekend and therefore it wouldn’t be genuine). Goes without saying: reply to reactions and feedback.
- Frequency: One blog post per week.
- Room for improvement? The writing can always be better and more on point, but in general I’m happy with how the format has evolved.
- Time required: Between 5 and 7 hours per post.
Snapchat: the inside scoop
- Purpose: Behind the scenes look, super direct, unpolished, immediate, interactive, as if you’d be sitting next to us in the office.
- Procedure: Be aware of situations that might lead to something funny, get camera ready and record. 50% of recorded material is never posted, but the other half ends up being entertaining. Post only video, because photos are too slow (if you need to post a photo, set to 1sec). If video is too slow, speed it up. Add emoji, stickers, text, use lenses, make it entertaining. Nothing is more cringeworthy than a slow or dull Snapchat account. Remember: It’s a story, so recording frequently across the day would ideally lead to some narrative as a whole. If it doesn’t, nevermind, it’ll be gone 24h later. Don’t be afraid to show your face and talk to the audience. This is as personal as it gets and you gotta embrace that.
- Frequency: Multiple times per day.
- Room for improvement? Tons. Sadly I haven’t had the time to do Snapchat over the past weeks, but we’ll get back to it. It’s the most fun channel of all when it’s done right.
- Time required: Posting is quick, but you gotta be alert at all times. ~30 mins per day all in all.
Tumblr: post funny gifs
- Purpose: At first we wanted this to be a scrap book à la A Color Bright or Edenspiekermann, but somehow this approach didn’t fit and felt forced. So the channel stayed dormant for months, nothing happening. Then one day I realized you could turn iPhone 6s live photos into gifs and we immediately revived the account, adding dozens of gifs from the photos I always take for the blog posts. There’s a certain magic about the grid of moving images and sometimes we just stare at it for minutes, mesmerized.
- Procedure: Initially I used Google’s Motion Stills app to extract gifs from live photos, but Tumblr has a 2MB file size limit and most of the produced gifs were too large. So I switched to Lively, which has a lower quality setting and shares directly to Tumblr. 👍
- Frequency: A handful of gifs per week.
- Room for improvement? Not really, I think the channel is pretty much perfect in its simplicity. Admittedly we’re only using Tumblr as a means to create the gif grid, and skipping most of its community features, but that’s fine.
- Time required: 5 minutes per day.
Twitter: we’re passionate about what we do
- Purpose: Show that we are passionate about the topics we work on. Comment on industry news and provide interesting links. The least personal channel of all.
- Procedure: Stumble upon interesting finds, e.g. via thenews.im, Twitter itself or random browsing. Retweet, comment. It’s tempting to recycle content from other channels (especially Instagram and Tumblr), but resist and keep it genuine to Twitter. Promote blog posts though. Avoid getting on peoples nerves through too frequent retweets or mentioning the same thing multiple times. Be a good citizen of the web, respectful, and considered.
- Frequency: The goal is at least 1–2 tweets per day, but most times we don’t even reach that.
- Room for improvement? I feel there’s a tremendous opportunity to be more involved, but we’re not making use of it yet. Oliver Reichenstein with iA is a good example of how to play this game well. Unsolved question: Should this account be about one person or the company? Clearly personal or anonymous? My feeling it needs to be led by one person to develop a distinct voice. We’re not there yet.
- Time required: Heavily depends, could easily be an hour per day.
Facebook: sigh!
- Purpose: We mainly have a Facebook page because you gotta have a Facebook page and currently we solely use it to announce blog posts. This is rather effective though, as most of the Medium traffic comes via Facebook.
- Procedure: Write a Facebook post with the company account for each blog post, providing a bit of information what it is about, but not too much. The first photo of the Medium post becomes the teaser image, however, that can be changed when posting on Facebook.
- Frequency: One post per week.
- Room for improvement? Definitely … we experimented with FB ads to promote our posts, but didn’t see any actual positive influence. Otherwise the Facebook page is mostly dead in the water, mainly because handling FB and adding content feels like work to me. It’s closer to a business development tool than a social network and that makes it hard to use, hard to understand and hard to maintain. I know there is a huge opportunity here to build an audience, but my colleagues expect me to be a programmer full-time and I’m doing all social media activities on the side. Facebook is just not something I am interested or invested in right now, so I prefer not to spend more time than necessary with it. This might change though.
- Time required: Minimal right now, but potentially a lot.
A few words about our “target audience”
Most self-proclaimed social media experts will now point out that we’ve never defined our target audience. Big mistake, huh? Well, I’ve never defined my target audience as a human being either. Likewise, our online character doesn’t have a clear audience. Over time we could identify some groups among our followers though:
- People who know us personally, e.g. family (hi mom & dad 👋) and friends.
- Clients: a good amount of our clients also read our posts which is often slightly awkward, but also kinda awesome. 😅
- People we might collaborate with: Potential hires, freelancers, interns, other companies, naturally.
- People curious about running a company, often even from completely foreign industries.
Admittedly this is not a well defined target audience and we’re fine with that. Our intention is to convey an attitude and stay true to ourselves; either people find us and the content of our posts interesting enough to click “follow” or they don’t. We’re not gonna change direction just to be more popular. 💩
Okay, that was pretty comprehensive! That’s totally a strategy!
No, it’s not, because all of this was written in hindsight and can change at any time. You’ll never be able to set goals like these beforehand, instead you’ll need to start experimenting with the different channels, tools and ways of expressing yourself. Don’t overthink it, just create accounts, be curious and see what fits you, your company or your brand. Find your tone of voice, visual style and improvise, reacting to feedback and taking your audience seriously. There is no clear path, which can be scary, but you just have to get going anyways.
What’s important to understand: Each channel and platform has a slightly different personality … of course they are all facets of the same online character and should feel coherent together, but also distinctly different. That’s why posting your tweets on Facebook or adding your Instagrams to Tumblr doesn’t work. You’ll only realize what works and where through experimentation 🔬 and observation 🔭.
All this is obviously more difficult when multiple people handle different channels … I am convinced that at least initially one curious person should own all social media efforts. Up until now that has been me at diesdas.digital, but it felt like a good point in time now to write all this down and maybe get the others on board as well. At least for the next two weeks I’ll be out hiking across Yorkshire, so hopefully this set of loose guidelines will lead the way for whoever takes over! And who knows? Maybe one channel will have evolved into something new when I come back. 😇
Anything else?
Not really. The week was super busy, wrapping up two projects projects, starting two new ones, making progress on current adventures. We looked at potential offices (see below). Nothing out of the ordinary, mostly business as usual. 😙
And that’s it, thanks for reading and potentially sharing this! 😉 I’m very much looking forward to next week when the recap blog post will be written by someone who is not me for the first time! Exciting! 😱
Until then: take care and have a nice weekend! 💚
Your friends at diesdas.digital
