Presented at Social Media Week Austin 2020
Over the last decade, brands have perfected the art of tapping into the tremendous reach and valuable data that social media affords. It’s provided a direct line to consumers and helped solidify voice and tone as key brand drivers. As we enter a new phase of social media, consumers want a more personal, authentic connection from the brands they patronize.
Join Corrin Foster, Kristin Sheppard, and Angèle Davidson to learn about developing original content that keeps an audience invested and engages on a human level through storytelling and enhanced visual touchpoints. Learn how to break through the mundane messaging by filming your own GIFs (yes, really!) and what it means to demonstrate human qualities on digital platforms.
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Give Them the Feels: Creating Content with a Human Connection
1. Give Them the Feels
Creating Content with
a Human Connection
2. Social media is an essential part of your business
strategy. Human conversations between brand and
audience encourages users to trust your brand,
encourage brand advocacy, and ultimately elevate
your business.
4. Humanizing Your Brand
● Know your audience and use personas
● Develop a unique voice
● Use everyday language
● Avoid jargon and marketing-speak
● Automation in moderation (and personalize when you can!)
● Use post timing to relate
● Acknowledge mistakes
● Strategically integrate visuals
7. Why create personas?
For more authentic and rewarding connections, think of your audience as human
8. Research
- Demographics
- Site Analytics (you have more data than you think!)
- Industry
- Pew
- Psychographics
- likes/dislikes
- goals/challenges
- values/fears
- Ask questions/talk to people
How should you create personas?
9. Make them real + Ask for
- Name
- Photo
- Location
- Job title
- Education
- Family situation
- Hobbies
- What do they read/watch
How should you create personas?
22. Devices Used to Relate - GIFs and Emojis
*When posting this many emojis, please be kind to those who use
screen readers and post them as a single image instead.
23. Pitfalls
● Politics
● Religion
● Complaints
● Apathy
● Sarcasm
● Rivalry
● Breaking news
● Performative updates
● Brands can maintain integrity while still having a personality
Kristin
Why does brand “personality” matter? Consumers said they were prompted to purchase based on the following social media actions.
Brand Actions Chart: https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/best-brands-social-media/
Corrin
So, what are some things a brand can do to seem more human? Let’s start with some tips that apply to most, if not all brands.
Do the research to know your audience.
So important we’re going to talk about personas later in the presentation
Beyond how they relate to your brand/product, what are some of their characteristics?
Develop a unique voice
This goes back to your overall brand strategy
What is your brand’s persona?
Stay true to the brand mission and vision
What is the change does the brand want to see in the world? How does it help make that change happen?
Should also include editorial standards
Types of content
Style - Oxford comma
Tone - formal, informal, you vs we
Avoid jargon or too much marketing-speak
Adults read at an 8th grade level
Most bestselling novels are written at a 7th grade level
Automation in moderation
Be present
Personalize when automation is necessary - ecommerce
Use your post timing to relate.
Fun to play with when creating your content calendar.
Morning at work, even wind-down time.
Let content relate to how they are feeling at that time.
Acknowledge mistakes
Mistakes happen
Acknowledge, correct, and learn
Visually, show people
We’re going to show you a lot of great examples and focus on this more in the second half of the presentation
Take complex concepts and make them more approachable
Visuals are known to improve learning and retention by 400%
Going back to editorial standards, decide when and how your brand is going to use graphics, photos, gifs, and emojis
Kristin
Show good and bad examples of points on previous slide. Use brands people know.
Kristin
Corrin
Why create personas
Want to be perceived as human? Think of your audience as human
Visualize audience - know their likes/dislikes, goals/challenges, values/fears
Corrin
How to create personas
Research
Demographics
Statistical data
Site/actual analytics. You have more data than you think! Twitter, FB, Instagram, website
Pew research
Psychographics
Attitudes and aspirations
likes/dislikes, goals/challenges, values/fears
Ask questions/talk to people
Corrin
Make them real
Pull this info from industry research, customer feedback, and visualizing your audience
Name, photo, location, job title, education
Family situation, hobbies, what do they read/watch
Corrin
Create primary, secondary, and tertiary
Consider “negative” personas
It can be good to visualize who your audience ISN’T
I find this helpful during brainstorms
Content idea that’s new, exciting, flashy...but does it attract the “wrong” audience
Wrong as in an audience that isn’t going to take action or take an action that isn’t beneficial to your brand or bottom line
Corrin
Historical fiction with a female protagonist
Book buyers = 60% Female, 60% degree-educated, 51% married, 26% of 30-44 (#1)
Washington DC = #1 most purchases of print books
Angèle
Empathy
Accessibility (audiovisual translations, captions, etc.)
Inclusivity (pronoun usage)
People-first language
Human interest stories/heart-warming case studies
Share customer stories
Solicit real opinions and engagement (respond to that engagement!)
Responsiveness
Different from engagement as it addresses a customer question, problem, or concern
GIFS and emojis
Convey tone and emotion
Social shares with images receive 150% more retweets and 2.3x more Facebook engagement than those without images
Experian found that, compared to text only subject lines, using emojis in email subject lines increased their open rates by 56%.
Angèle
Empathy example: Comcast highlighting a use of voice command that’s meaningful
Dell Tech sharing the journey of Lily getting to see and experience the ballet like she never had before.
Angèle
Empathy example: Airbnb Citizen. A community of hosts, guests and other believers in the power of home sharing to help tackle economic, environmental and social challenges around the world.
Corrin
General human interest story
Even better if it relates to your brand
Whether a conscious decision on the part of Target or not, it’s damn cute and has almost 800,000 likes and 90,000 retweets
Kristin
Facebook example: Innocent drinks uses humor in every post, prioritizing audience cultivation over product promotion.
Corrin
Responsiveness serves as customer service, while reaffirming brand reputation for onlookers.
Any business that has a high volume of customer service.
Most apparent of that is airlines
NOTE
This is a dedicated team
They have access to the systems to get answers
They provide a service they don’t just placate
Kristin
Corrin
Unless relevant to your brand, tread lightly…
Politics
Religion
Complaints about employees, clients, competitors
Apathy - nobody wants to do business with a brand that can’t muster excitement for their own product/industry
Sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted
Rivalry that isn’t reciprocated in good spirits
Not being aware of breaking news
Don’t offer thoughts and prayers just to offer thoughts and prayers
Brands can maintain integrity while still having a personality and backbone -- see brand strategy, editorial guidelines, personas...
AngèleHow many people have made their own GIFs?
How many people have worked with stop-motion or know what it is?
Angèle
Tools + Methods:
Because GIFs tend to stay on the smaller side, you can normally get away with using a smartphone camera
Take advantage of burst modes
Make sure you’re not moving too much or use a smartphone tripod
You can also use a traditional camera for more complicated shots that require you to have more control over what the camera is capturing (low light situations or things moving at a fast speed - Light bulb and buy/sell slips)
You can use either to capture video (if you camera has the capability) and freeze frames instead of taking a series of stills. I do this frequently when I’m trying to capture something that would require my own hands or body to be in the frame so I’m not having to worry about practicing yoga to press the camera button (I’ve pulled a lot of muscles this way - VR headset on)
My style is very simplified. I like to put things in isolation, so if the subject isn’t filling the frame, I will put paper out on a table or wall so that I can control what the background is that I have to work with in post. I do this because I can then add more space to my frames as I build out the creative in different sizes.
Make sure you tape your paper down tightly and try not to scruff or mark it otherwise it will take a lot of time to correct in post.
If you want to shoot frames for a GIF over a surface that has a texture, you must make sure you’re not moving your camera at all - There are exceptions to this like the pea GIF. Otherwise, you won’t be able to have a smooth transition from frame to frame. You can also try faking it with adding texture after in post just to the background (GPS example)
Leave your scene setup until you know you’ve captured a sequence of images that will work for what you need
If you can have your phone of camera send images automatically without taking it off a tripod, do it so you don’t shift your shot
Review your images in your preferred application and make sure you didn’t get a camera or prop bump that cause you to need to reshoot the sequence
Angèle
Prop choice tips:
I frequently use items that I have in my own home. It’s one of the easiest ways to make your content more relatable. Even if you’re targeting a really specific group of people, most people on a basic level have a set of things they do or interact with on a daily basis (like tying their shoes, eating, or watching TV), so if you can figure out how to make your creative include those elements you’re one step closer to keeping them engaged.
The other thing I’ve learned is that toys and models are an awesome tool to have in your prop closet. It’s much cheaper to buy a bunch of diecast cars than renting the full-size ones or even purchasing stock images or footage of them. Amazon prime is amazing, and I couldn’t do the creative I do without it because I typically on have a 1-2 week window to turn creative around. A nice budget helps too.
If it makes sense for the assignment, include actual humans in your GIFs (show ag GIF)
If you have a assignment that requires that you use a prop that you can’t get your hands on for whatever reason, look to see if you can get any stock images/footage to use (show old TV set)
Angèle
What applications to use to put frames together and export GIFs:
I use photoshop and AfterEffects depending on the type of thing I’m trying to animate. There are other applications out there you can use though. Google it.
Simple still frame stitching can be done in Photoshop
If I want to freeze frames from a video, I use AfterEffects
If I want to apply graphics or some special effect to the frames themself (like a timeline morph - show) I would use AfterEffects)
Angèle
After you capture + Tips (things like how many frames and lining stuff up etc):
Bring your images into your preferred application and asset size (show them in photoshop)
The amount of frames depends on what type of thing you’re trying to show.
If you’re showing Austin traffic, maybe you only need like 3 frames? Or maybe you just have 1 ;)
If it’s something faster or something you want to look more smooth as it goes through the frames, you’ll need more frames to work with to prevent that typical stop-motion look (and then you need to question why you aren’t using video for this creative because it’s going to allow you to have a smaller file size and better quality image)
Create a timeline for your images and drag them to the length you want them to appear for
If you need to reduce file weight, you can erase the background around the thing that moves in your frames or you can shoot it with nothing on the background and then with all there and erase for each frame (show pennies)
Add any treatments - In my case, I turn everything black and white and throw a color overlay over it. This helps everything feel like it’s part of a set and it’s hard to get picky about props when you have short timelines.
Export! If you’re in photoshop like we are, here’s how to do it. If you’re in AfterEffects, there are a couple of ways to do it, but I most often will export it as a video and bring it back into Photoshop and just export as a GIF from there.