Three Social Media Posts #2 — What Worked? What Didn’t?
Posting on social media may not be as simple as many people think. Every detail matters if you want to craft great posts.
Even NYT can do better sometimes
A few weeks ago, a social strategy editor at NYT told us that her team was planning for social media posts, a day before the Mueller report was released. They made good Instagram Stories with consistent visual elements and credits to contributors. However, the Stories overwhelmed me.
The problem? Too much text on one slide for any viewer to digest. Viewers can tap and hold to give themselves more time, but isn’t it publishers’ responsibility to optimize user experience? If I were the social media editor, I would have doubled the number of slides, in other words, breaking (almost) every one of them into two. I would also trim the quoted excerpts (without affecting the context, of course). Using one slide as an example:
The original slide below, impossible to digest in about five seconds:
And I will break it into two slides below (with trimmed excerpts).
The first one:
And the second one:
Publishers should pay attention to Instagram Stories to make sure they have the right amount of text on each slide — neither too much to overwhelm viewers nor too little to bore them.
Mother Jones used Facebook as a listening tool
This is still very rare among publishers, but I always believe social media are tools for two-way conversations between publishers and their audiences, not just publishers-to-audiences, but MoJo almost nailed it by using Facebook to figure out what their readers wanted to know about measles.
One edit I would propose, and then the post will be perfect. I would go more specific about how users can contact MoJo. They could tell viewers to click the linked callout form and that it would take them no longer than five minutes to complete it. This way, users would get a more clear sense of what MoJo was looking for from them and how they could contribute to the reporting.
Great Tweet from SF Chronicle
The Chronicle Tweeted about Paradise, a town that was devastated by the camp fire.
The Tweet is my pick for this week. It had great visuals, the drone footage of the town, so that it would stand out from the Twitter algorithm that prioritizes videos. It touched a local trending topic and provoked curiosity from viewers to learn more about what the future of the community would look like. I always believe the best Tweets give context but without giving too much away in order to direct readers back to the linked article, and the Tweet serves as an excellent example.
