Have you ever noticed how brand posts on Facebook always include an image?
Image quality on Twitter is less important. Note how this could very well have been a small photo report, lower down on a newspaper page.
The same applies when we consume social media, which can be divided broadly into four focus categories:
• Social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr)
• Photo sharing (e.g. Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat)
• Video sharing (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, IGTV, TikTok).
Let’s take a look at how a brand adapts the same campaign and brand message across the four big platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest). Even with Instagram and Pinterest both being classified as photo-sharing platforms, the consumer patterns (and therefore content angles) are different.
For the purposes of this exercise, I gathered some screen grabs from Dove’s Self-Esteem Project, which has enjoyed great acclaim worldwide. It is based on a study conducted in the United Kingdom, detailed on their website, which showed that while more than 1 million girls suffer from low body confidence, two-thirds admit that they feel prettier online than in real life.
1 in 2 girls say they are using social networks “all the time”, across an average of 4 different networks and are increasingly considered as being “always on”. The average UK girl takes 12 minutes to prepare for a single “selfie”, thus spending 84 minutes a week getting ready for selfies.
Dove found that “the number of girls who say social networks make them feel worse about their appearance doubles between the ages of 13 years to 18 years” – from roughly a third to about two-thirds in only a few years.
They tell this story in striking ways, with the help of both images and great textual captions and hashtags, catering to the same group of consumers on different platforms but tailoring how they phrase it according to where it is posted. On Facebook, you will see that brands don’t often post text-only status updates. They include highly polished images or videos with a great placeholder image. It almost looks like the kind of advert you’d see in a glossy magazine. Everyone looks polished: great lighting, beautiful styling, sometimes with text included in the image, but not too much.
Note how this image was clearly not taken with a phone. The image more closely resembles those family photo shoots you see on Facebook, where everyone magically appears to have dressed in white and denim that day. Where an entire family is arranged in some photographer’s studio in an attempt to look as relaxed as possible, while obviously giving away that they’re posing for a camera by looking straight at the lens.
On Twitter, the same campaign for the same brand presents more like a news post than a glossy magazine advert. It is clearly an image that was taken on the same day that it was posted – not nearly as much production involved. You can almost imagine it popping up in a newspaper, right? Perhaps it could even have been taken with a phone, but a phone is also obviously being used in one of the images. It is capturing a fleeting moment in time, reporting it for the sake of the information – it is not a portrait for the benefit of posterity. It is about the caption – a very information-heavy caption at that. While the Facebook post didn’t feature hashtags, here you find more than one. These are crucial because they allow this post to align with global activities #ConfidentGirl or #DSEP2018 (Dove Self-Esteem Project 2018), which can be activated by Dove in different ways across the world. The hashtag allows all these worldwide activities involved in the same project to be searchable and accessible by users anywhere. It shows that the brand is truly committed and consistently involved, by creating a publicly accessible record of activities, but not only on the Dove website; they are also walking the talk on a platform where we love holding people accountable: Twitter.
On Instagram, the same campaign shows a post featuring two images as well, but here they are presented as a carousel – you have to page through – not as two separate but related posts on the same topic, but rather as a set-up-and-reveal tactic.
The first image in the carousel is of a young girl in school uniform and, as in the case of Twitter, this photo could very well have been taken with a phone. It is not nearly as polished as the Facebook post, yet some design work has been done to craft it into something that is much stronger, visually, than the Twitter post. It feels instant enough to fit into the aesthetic you’ve come to expect from an Instagram feed, but it is somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, from a style perspective. Once you page to the second image in the carousel, it reveals the campaign message. In this way, Dove echoes the message you would be able to read in one image on Facebook, but without crowding the image too heavily. This makes it appear similar to the kind of content that typical private users and influencers would produce and takes it further away from the usual branded content. In fact, neither of the images include Dove’s logo or overt Dove branding. Even if you are scrolling so fast that you wouldn’t
