Developing Content for Social Media
Turning content into strategy.
Over the course of the class, we took a look into the big four social networking sites and a brief overview of the history of social networks. By understanding the history of social and digital communication, then we're able to better determine the future of our profession and how to prepare for upcoming changes.
For our final project, we were given the following prompt:
You are the new communications specialist for an independent clothing company that sells t-shirts. Your boss has asked you to propose a content marketing strategy to guide the creation of content (videos, blogs, and social media posts) for the next quarter. She wants something that will “stand out” and “go viral” and tells you to get as creative as you want. The company currently has a website with a blog, an Instagram account, a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Facebook group for current fans of the company. Your business goals are to increase brand awareness and t-shirt sales.
Given the prompt, we had to create a 5-10 page proposal that includes six required sections: Company Overview, Benchmarks, Proposed Strategy, Data, Metrics and Sample Posts. I chose to go the ethical and sustainable clothing route for my made-up tee company. Throughout my time at Agnes, a lot of the projects I've completed have focused on a sustainable lifestyle, and choosing to "create" a t-shirt company that makes elevated basics from recycled material resonated with my personal preference. I named that company CLEAR. because it honors the transparency of the cost of materials, transport and capital, along with giving back to the communities where the factories are by offering fair living wages and quarterly check-ins about the working conditions.
I used SproutSocial as my preferred social media management tool to track engagement analytics from the brand's competitors, in this case: Everlane, Kotn, and MATE the Label.
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The following report goes into detail about what our competitors are doing on their social profiles, what their engagement looks like, what we can learn from them and what sort of content strategy should CLEAR. create.
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Download the PDF version of the cross-platform strategy report here.
Cross-Platform Strategy Deck
Decks are easier to read anyway.
This deck not only is visually appealing, but also highlights important findings done during the Cross-Platform Strategy research. When completing this final project for the course, I actually created the deck first and used it as an outline to write my report. After completing the research section of the report, I came back to the deck and filled in any missing information and updated sections where the data had changed.
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For example, when I was first picking benchmarks, I wanted to avoid using Everlane since they're significantly larger than MATE the Label and Kotn. However, I was relying heavily on Everlane on creating my own strategy that I thought it was only fair to compare myself against them.
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Download the PDF version of the cross-platform strategy deck here.
Group Project: Competitive Analysis
We were assigned a group and an industry for a competitive analysis report using SproutSocial as our social media management tool. The industry we were assigned was banking and it was up to our team to decide who our brand was and who our competitors were. We decided to use our "home brand" as Delta Community Credit Union and compare ourselves to Georgia OWN's Credit Union, Ameris Bank, and Chase Bank.
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Georgia OWN's Credit Union was a direct competitor in terms of size and credit union. Ameris and Chase Bank were selected as corporate competitors, but Chase Bank we used as a high-performing bank. By selecting a smaller financial institution as our home brand, it taught us an important lesson of knowing where we stand in our market and how to follow the trends set by a national bank.
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I was designated as the Creative Director for the project and helped guide our team on how to conduct a competitive analysis. I trained my team members on how to use SproutSocial (connecting profiles, finding the data) and how to analyze the data that the program pulled. Sometimes, this information isn't so cut and dry and a fresh look at the data set is necessary. My entire team was very eager and willing to learn how to use these programs as tools to aid their social media management, and we all brought a unique perspective to the team.
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Below, you'll find our report explaining what our competitors are doing and what we learned from them.
Download the PDF version of the competitive analysis here.
The team put together this presentation. Here, we created a shareable deck that summarizes our findings without having to read through the 11-page report.
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Download the PDF version of the bank competitive analysis deck here.