What are they?
Social media graphics (or SMGs) are single tiles that are designed to stop people scrolling down their LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter feeds.
We need to entice them with a standout graphic. Then they read the caption for the context.
Users can:
- Navigate different sections
- Open drop-down menus (custom builds only)
- Expand pop-up boxes and accordion text
- Play audio and video clips
- Answer multiple-choice questions
- Explore our data on their own terms
Process
How to write social media graphics
1. Short and sweet
Social media graphics should be eye-catching and instantly understandable.
This is why brevity is so important.
2. Get noticed
Think in terms of arresting visuals and graphic devices, such as stock photos, maps, mini graphs, icons, large figures and big bold quotes.
What would catch your eye on social media?
Consider collaborating on this with the member of the Design team assigned to the job.
3. Keep it snappy
The caption can be much longer than the text we might have written for micrographics, but it doesn’t have to be. Having a caption simply gives you more freedom to pare back the designed graphic.
However, you still need to follow the ‘Writing digital’ guidelines for the caption: keep it snappy and to-the-point.
4. Play to your strengths
Unless you are using a quote, the star is usually the data. So think about the best way to show it off. What’s going to make it pop? It’s usually not a good idea to bury the number in the middle of text.
5. Less is more
Less is more for the graphic itself, so keep it short and simple. Edit it down to the essentials. Avoid multi-clause sentences, and keep it to one sentence — aim for fewer than 15 words. In some instances, you can get rid of the words altogether and move them to the caption instead.
6. Add context
If necessary, contextualise/explain each data point with a brief, powerful statement, because our survey questions (which are probably going to be included in the graphic as part of the data point) are often wordy.
But keep it short, and remember that your caption can take up a lot of the contextual slack here.
7. Remember the call to action
Make sure you include a call to action (CTA) in your suggested caption text, even though the platform will dictate how it is used. On Instagram, for instance, you can't include a link in the caption. But you can give the client something to work with.
Two or three strong action words here will direct the audience on what to do next.
The CTA is usually added before the link in the post copy (such as when you click on the example to the left). In some cases, a standardised CTA appears within a clickable, rectangular device in the area below the graphic.
How to be a good partner to the design team
Here’s how to prepare your scripts for design:
1.
Remove any comments and track changes from the script.
2.
Use square brackets for any text that shouldn’t be included in the document. You can use this text to tell the design team what is:
- The title
- The subtitle
- A standfirst
- A top-level/section heading and lower-level headings (if it’s complicated, you can use an A/B/C system to show the hierarchy of headings)
- A boxout/sidebar
- A call to action
3.
Format your footnotes consistently, or if you’re using hyperlinks place them on the right text.
4.
Suggest pullquotes and pullstats using comments in the Word file. It’s a good idea to format these correctly in your comment box — i.e. put the name and job title underneath the full quote.
5.
Provide a clean, proofread data sheet, which could be linked from the charts in the Word file. Make sure that the design team knows exactly where the data is for each chart.
6.
Charts should have only the key storyline data included. Make sure the data sheet matches this and the labels have been proofread.
7.
Designers should not be rekeying/typing any words, because that’s how errors creep in. So don’t just provide screenshots/images of your charts or tables — make sure they can just copy and paste the text from the data sheet.
Real thought leadership.
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