Chapter 3: Social Media Design Strategies

Chapter 3 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers social media marketing strategies. There are a lot of parallels between the strategies used for social media marketing and strategies used in software development, especially in user interface design. A big component is using a persona to help drive design decisions. A persona is a method of creating a fictional person based on a group of real people. The first thing to be done to create a persona is to determine what demographic the persona will be based on. For example, a population can be split into different groups based on age, gender, income, location, job, hobbies, and values. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a good starting point.

Once the group is defined, start creating the fictional person. Give them a real name first. This will allow a greater degree of relating to that persona. Give that persona an age and a family. Based on that information you can start defining more personality traits. Try to make these representative of the group you chose for this persona. If the group has some incompatible traits, go ahead and create more personas. Generally, between three and five personas are good. Once the traits are defined, write up some background on the persona. Use your creative side to make it a short story. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should be detailed enough that you could introduce the persona like a real person to someone else. This description will be used when creating social media posts. When a post is being designed, think about what kind of post the persona would like. This is the same as when using a persona in other contexts, like software development. Personas can be used for all kinds of design where a third party will be the one using or interacting with the product.

Another important design strategy isn’t so much an initial design strategy, but a design tuning strategy. Using metrics to help steer future iterations of a design is very important. Again, this is also used in software development, but in a slightly different way. For example, when designing an interface, a metric might be time to accomplish a task or time spent on a page. In terms of social media, metrics can include number of views, number of likes, or number of comments. It is important to note that all of these metrics are measurable and quantifiable. A metric should always have a number involved. It doesn’t matter if a viewer seems to like a post unless that like is measurable. For example, on a platform with comments and likes, a like and comment can indicate a greater enjoyment of a post than just a like. This allows future posts to use concrete data to inform decisions rather than assumptions about what should and shouldn’t do well. For example, posts released at a certain time may generally do best at that time, but a specific demographic may differ from that trend. Having concrete metrics will allow for a quick, data-driven improvement.

These metrics aren’t just for improving post performance, though. These metrics will also help in any professional environment. Data-driven decisions will almost always be forgiven more easily than decisions based on assumptions. It is good practice to always have a paper trail justifying decisions so that when a post flops you will not be blamed fully. This applies to any user-facing decision since it is not if a post flops, but when a post flops. Users aren’t always predictable. Any number of factors can impact performance. Having a good reason for what you’ve done is always good for reducing the variation in user interactions from having a negative impact on your career.