Three Social Media Posts #4: What Worked? What Didn’t?
Every detail matters if you want to craft great posts.
Bloomberg: A concise and conversational Tweet
The Tweet was straightforward about interesting characteristics of robots — the sympathy they could possibly express could catch users’ attention already. The Tweet was also crafted in a simple and conversational tone. It sounded like a casual conversation with friends.
In addition, the head image conveyed a sense of communication and sympathy. The headline and synopsis added more context, the potential impact of 5G may have a AI-based assistants/robots.
I liked the whole craft of the Tweet. It started with a post that contained most interesting elements of the story and crafted in a conversational tone. It had a head image that integrated well into other content. The headline and synopsis that added more context to the story. Bloomberg seemed to be aware of the order users see each element (post, head image, headline and then synopsis), and it followed the way eyes moved.
Buzzfeed News: Interesting topic, but could have planned better for the Instagram post
Posting screenshots of headlines and feature images works on Instagram sometimes, but only if the headlines can provoke curiosity of users and the images/charts are visually compelling. The headline grabbed attention, but the graph messed up. The charts and text were too small to be readable on mobile or desktop.
What they should have done, I thought, was to make the graphs bigger, break the whole chart into several different screenshots and make the post an album. This way, the charts and text could become readable, and they wouldn’t overwhelm viewers by cramming everything into one screenshot.
Last but not least, they could have tighten up the captions (if you click on the embedded post you should be able to see them). Instagram shows the first one to two lines of captions, and users need to click to expand everything for longer captions. Therefore, Buzzfeed News should have gone straightforward with “The College Board looks at several neighborhood environment statistics to contextualize SAT numbers.”
Interesting snippet on NPR’s Facebook page
The post is among my favorite picks for this week for several reasons: The combination of maths and football was an interesting subject. The quote talked about using football to show the beauty of maths and triggered curiosity of viewers. The head image conveyed the two subjects, the athlete and maths.
In sum, the post and head image conveyed an interesting fact but without giving too much away (about how exactly the combination worked). It prompted me to click on the linked article for more details.
