Kristi Dement

According to the book The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio, companies need to shape their visual story.  Each piece of content needs to have a clear theme and point of view as well as a take away message for the reader.

Content needs to be aligned with who you are as a company: voice, personality, and values. Once woven together, these themes shape your story.  It is important to list your goals and determine how visual content can help achieve them.  Ask yourself, if your company were a person, what would it look like in real life?

Embrace social media’s more personable, human side.  Look for the most commonly discussed conversation themes from your online consumers.  Shape your story and identify major themes to craft your visual content mix.  Look at your goals, company voice, and customer feedback by social media platform.

Determine Your Visual Content Mix:

• The magic is in the mix to keep storytelling fresh
• It allows you to deliver more personalized content to target audiences across different platforms
• Evaluate your desired frequency per platform for posts, tweets, pins, etc.
• Have a formula and clear plan of what steps you will take
• Frequency varies by company and by social media channel
• Quality content always trumps quantity and volume
• Content must be interesting, important, and relevant to your audience
• The usual shelf life of a tweet is considered an hour at most
• The shelf life of a Facebook post is around 24 hours
• Prioritize by social media platform the most important content themes that go into crafting your visual story
• The mix needs to balance what is important from an ongoing visual storytelling perspective with goals, current events, questions, and general conversation from your customers
• Content goals will likely change each month depending upon how much news your company has or tweets your making in response to fan engagement
• Content should aim to be mostly upbeat, fun, motivating, and engaging
• Outlining content themes makes it easy to identify what messages will be best conveyed as photos, videos, infographics, presentations, etc.

Authors Walter and Gioglio remind us to be listening and responding to what is being said about our company as well as learning the most commonly asked questions.  When we know that, companies can better respond to their own target audience.  This means setting goals and developing a strategy.  Our content will adjust in response to real time as we get live social media feedback.