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Creating platform specific social media content

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17 April
2020
Posted by
Lyndsey

A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach never works in social media marketing, and not all content is suitable for every social media platform. When you’re communicating a message across multiple channels, creating platform specific content is key to maximising your impact, and also just playing by the rules of each platform. 

Many tools and plug-ins allow you to publish your posts across all platforms at once, but sharing the same piece of content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, will negatively impact your results, and make your channels look unprofessional. 

There are multiple elements to consider in creating platform specific content that displays correctly on each channel, meets audience expectations, maximises results, and successfully positions you and your organisation in the social and digital space. 

Why exactly do we need platform specific content in social media marketing?

 

Audiences

Every social media platform caters to its own particular audience. This can be a clear cut as the obvious demographic differences across platforms – e.g. younger audiences favour TikTok and Snapchat rather than Facebook and LinkedIn. As well as this, while you may find the same people on multiple platforms, each one operates its own bubble, therefore each audience has particular expectations for the content they anticipate and want to see on the platform. So tailor your content across platforms based on its audience’s demographics, interests and expectations. 

Style of Communicating

It’s natural for most of us to communicate differently depending on who we are talking to and the setting we are in. Social media is no different, and different platforms all have different styles of communicating. These can be across delivery specifications such as use of hashtags and emojis, and caption length, but also across tone of voice, style of writing, and the messages we communicate. You might write medium length captions with a light hearted tone and lots of hashtags on Instagram, while on LinkedIn you’ll want to go for formal tone, lengthy captions, and only a couple of hashtags.

Format Specifications

This one’s important – it’s great to tailor your messages, communication and style across platforms, but you simply have to make sure that your assets are bespoke for each platform. Why? Because each platform has detailed format specifications for images, graphics and videos. At Piquant we specialise in producing format specific assets, tailored according to the specifications of each social media platform, so that your graphics are the correct size and your videos are the right length. 

Platform Specific Social Media Content

Let’s have a look at a few of the different ways we tailor our content outputs so they are platform specific

 

Strategy

At the marketing strategy development stage of a social media management project, we carefully research and define your particular messages, objectives and target audiences in order to select the best possible content formats across different social media platforms. This is where we plan not only what platforms we will use, but what types of content we need to communicate your message to your chosen audience, and how we will adapt those content pieces across each platform.

Videos

An area of great importance for us – we make sure to create platform specific outputs of every video we create. You simply cannot share the same 2.5 minute, horizontal format campaign video across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Insta Stories, Snapchat… We create platform specific versions of all our video content to adapt to required format specifications. For example, we produce different length cuts of the same video for each platform – on Instagram the maximum video length is 1 minute, while on Twitter it’s 2 minutes and 20 seconds, and so on. We create different sized versions of every video – a vertical version for Snapchat and Insta Stories, a square version for Instagram, and more. That’s not to mention different recommendations for captions and thumbnails. There’s so much to consider when adapting video content across social media platforms. 

Read more about maximising organic reach for online videos

Graphics sizes

This one is very important – if you don’t create social media graphics correctly sized for each platform, your content will lose its impact and some of your messaging might even get cropped out. We output all our graphics into the correct size for each platform: vertical versions for story content, square for Instagram, perfect Facebook event cover images, specific sized graphics for Twitter (the worst culprit for cropping). Basically, a simple square or rectangle graphic won’t work across all social media platforms and placements.

Content Type

Sometimes it’s necessary to communicate one message in very different ways across social platforms. For example, graphics work well on Twitter, but on Instagram they are best left in favour of high quality images. Blog links are great content for LinkedIn and Facebook, while on Instagram you’ll have to adapt by sharing a relevant image to your feed and putting a link in your bio. An infographic will be great on LinkedIn but definitely not for your Insta feed or story. So when communicating one message across social media often the best approach is to adapt the content type completely for each platform. 

Copy and Delivery

Part of our campaign management process at Piquant is creating detailed social media content schedules, where we map out our content for every platform on each particular day. It’s at this stage that we tailor our copywriting style, approach and delivery for our chosen platforms. This means adapting our tone, use of emojis, caption length, and amount of hashtags, and even the particular angle or hook of the message we want to focus on, depending on where the content is going. 

View our Campaign Management work

Read more about our Campaign Management services

If you want to chat to us about a social media campaign, feel free to call us, send an email, or message us on Facebook

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