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Design Gone Digital Social Media Campaign
Editor's Notes
- Design Gone Digital Social Media Branding Campaign During the fall of my 4th and final year at the University of Northern Iowa, I enrolled in a Digital Advertising class in which we were tasked with a social media project. We completed this project over the course of the semester, which was roughly 3 months.
- Objective The objective for the project was to develop, maintain, and promote our own personal brand (based on our professional interests) using social media. I created several project goals of my own that I set to obtain throughout the journey of this semester long project. I knew that I wanted to create a consistent brand image. I wanted my personal brand to have a solid consistency across all of its platforms, both in its design and its content which mostly stemmed from the blog itself. My next goal was to make connections with the social media design community. I sought to use my social media account as networking tools and opportunities to find community surrounding my primary topic. By making these connections, I knew that I could use these resources for inspiration and content on my blog. I wanted to grow my understanding in the field. I knew that going into the project I was curious about the role of graphic design in social media, but I also knew that it would not necessarily be easy to find information on the subject right away and would take exploration. Finally, as a graphic designer I knew that understanding self-promotion would be an essential skill in advancing my career. Through this project, I wanted to learn the tools of digital advertising and social media marketing.
- Building My Brand
- Development The first step of the project was to develop our personal brand. Part of developing this brand was exploring our identity. This consisted of thinking about personal characteristics, interests, talents, and goals we have for our future. After this we then had to determine which talents and interests would best match up with our future career goals. By taking these three lists, we took items from each category to combine them into one personal brand statement. After creating these lists, which included far more than I have chosen to include here on the screen, I found trouble combining and narrowing down. When I noticed that I had social media in both my talents and interests category as well as future goals, I decided that I would be interest in exploring the relationship that quality graphic design has in the realm of social media.
- Who I Am As a graphic design student with an interest in digital studies and advertising, I have grown an appreciation and interest in social media. Particularly, I have grown an interest in the role that quality design plays in the world of social media. This is the personal brand statement that I created. I am interested in the importance of design, specifically in social media, as our world become more digital and ever-changing. What once began as an organic way to connect with others online has quickly grown into a platform for being one the strongest tools in the marketing and advertising field. I sought out to cover the culture of social media, ways the companies utilize it to market their brands, and how graphic design plays an important role in all of this.
- Design Gone Digital I chose to name my brand “Design Gone Digital” for a few reasons. The first reason is that I wanted to the name to be an accurate description of what my brand was about. Combining terms like “graphic design” and “social media marketing” were lengthy, and I wanted users who interacted with my brand to be drawn in and interested. By naming my brand “Design Gone Digital” I wanted to convey the message that graphic design, that once began primarily in a print industry and continues to be, is also evolving into the social media and digital world and why it matters.
- Social Media Links For this project I started a WordPress blog, created social media accounts including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and developed my LinkedIn profile.
- Brand Style As a design student interested in social media, I obviously wanted my blog to not only have good design but to have the quality social media design I was seeking after. I wanted to make sure it was simple and cohesive across all of my platforms, including my blog site and my social media. I wanted my pages to be easy to follow and have a clear hierarchy of understanding like good design does. I felt fairly limited when it came to designing the layout of my WordPress site. It was hard to navigate having never used it prior to this course. Once I found a simple layout that provided the same message as my social profiles, I stuck with it to avoid further anxiety and frustration down the road and put forth effort to areas where it mattered - such as the actual content of the blog. I originally had a color scheme with a few more colors, but with ended up compromising to the mauve pink color and black and white. I found myself getting stuck in the beginning and becoming so absorbed in the design and style guide for my brand that I was beginning to get behind on posting content. I chose a sans serif font that I used in my logo, that could be used at various weights for different points of necessary emphasis. This style was maintained throughout my blog, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Brand Style Given that my blog was centered around design, I wanted the overall style of my personal brand to be well-rounded. This looked like utilizing consistency across my profile pages, but also in the content I posted as well. I found myself getting so fixated on the design in every aspect of the project, that I fell behind in content early on like I mentioned on the previous slide. Since my whole brand was focused on the role of quality design in social media I found that this brought immense pressure to me personally managing my feeds. I utilized design as communication by keeping my visual content the core of my social feeds. For example, I included an infographic I designed myself of a timeline in my branded colors that related to my initial blog post, “The Rise of Social Media.” Along the way I also implemented tools that made managing my social media a lot smoother. I utilized QR codes in places where I wanted to cross my social feeds and get followers from one platform to follow me on another. Linktree was a game changer for me. I had used it in previous jobs before and felt it was the perfect option to include in the bios of my social accounts. This way I could include multiple links in one spot, allowing users to reach my other social accounts, my blog site as a whole, and my latest post of that week.
- Wordpress Blog
- Blog Overview Overall I wanted to keep my blog as the main focus of the project. Ultimately that was where I was spending most of my time analyzing, creating, and designing content. Everything that I would promote or publish on social feeds I wanted to draw back to my blog and drive a majority of the traffic to the site. I aimed to supply helpful content. When setting out on this journey, I myself wanted to learn more about the importance of design in social media because I had not known fully about it myself. I wanted to seek after people like me as the target audience that would be desiring to work in the field and gain knowledge through the content that I was posting. I sought to create blog posts that contained a variety of information, yet were still relevant to the main brand statement. Finally, I wanted to provide greater knowledge for myself and others in the realm of social media design. I wanted to provide anything from influencers and creatives in the field, to job opportunities and tips on how to succeed. These were the main goals that I kept at the heart of my endeavor when walking through the process of this project.
- Blog Metrics I posted a total of 11 blogs over the course of the semester (Let’s Socialize - Introduction to Blog, The Rise of Social Media, 5 Jobs That Pay You To Be On Social Media, Life of a [College] Social Media Designer, Interview with Lauren Nomansen - Local Designer, Social Media Design Trends Pt. 1 and 2, Social Media Guide Series including 3 posts - Before You Begin, Building Your Brand, and Creating Your Content, and finally Best Brands on Social Media). I received quite a few comments on my blog posts, especially Life of a [College] Social Media Designer, that was really relatable. I received a total of 8 comments over the course of the semester, reaching 368 users that interacted with my blog, and a total of 821 pageviews.
- SEO I chose to utilize a plugin on Wordpress to optimize my posts for search. This included creating focus keyphrases, SEO titles, writing description tags as well as meta descriptions. This was an aid to the success of my blog because it made it more likely to generate organic search traffic. On each of my posts I created these SEO elements and aimed for a green light on the SEO and readability of the post for higher success.
- Content I wanted to make sure that I created a variety in the type of content that I used in my blog posts. My top priority was bringing content that was relatable, new, and beneficial. I wrote about my personal experiences as a college social media designer, interviews with local designers in the field, and informational “how-to guides” to help others kickstart their social media branding.
- What Worked My personal experience blog posts were most successful. This included my experiences as a social media designer in my time in college, as well as an interview that I did with a local designer who markets her business primarily through social media. These posts were most successful in the fact that they were easily relatable to my audience. Since I featured myself and Lauren Nomansen, both of our family, friends, and supporters played a huge role in the success of these posts because they were shared thoroughly through social media.
- What Didn’t Work I posted multiple blog posts in the series “Social Media Guide.” I do not think that these posts did as well because I posted all 3 of them towards the end of my project. At this time in the project I was struggling with posting as consistently as I did in the beginning. Rather than posting one blog a week, these blog posts were uploaded within days of each other and since they had heavier content posted right after one another I do not think it engaged users as much. Posting them so close together with high content created overstimulation of information and resulted in a lower session duration.
- Google Analytics
- Google Metrics I was able to generate a total of 847 pageviews to my blog site over the course of this project. I am proud with that number because I found it difficult to increse engagement during certain points of the project. I ended up posting 11 blog posts, and was able to post a blog roughly once a week. I thoroughly planned out content that was full of variety and was both helpful and relevant to my target audience. By posting content consistently and relevant overall, I was able to decrease my bounce rate over the course of the project and raise the amount of my average session duration. This was probably the most difficult aspect of the project so I am proud that I was able to push these numbers in the direction of my goal.
- Google Analytics I experienced a few areas of spikes in pageviews. This occurred when I posted my first introduction blog, an interview with a local designer, and when I was reaching the end of the project. I received a lot of engagement when I posted my first blog announcing to family and friends of my latest creative endeavor, which is why a spike happened right away. The next spike resulted in my post “Interview with Lauren Nomanesen.” Lauren is a freelance designer in the Cedar Valley/Waterloo area and shared my blog to both her personal and professional social media accounts. This gained attraction from her clients, friends, and family and created a large amount of page views. For my last smaller spike I was consistently posting more and made a strong effort for a final push to finish out the project. This included many social media posts on all of my associated accounts, as well as my personal. By creating a sense of urgency including “final post of the semester” and “help me reach my semester goals” I generated a lot of traffic from my followers and friends. I feel that I could have seen more success had I been more consistent through the entirety of the project. I was balancing heavy coursework and outside student organizations on top of the work for the project and found it difficult to manage and stay thoroughly consistent during the whole project as a busy college student.
- Acquisition Metrics I drew in visitors to my blog through a variety of channels. I consistently promoted my blog through my social media accounts that I created for this project and was surprised to see that Facebook outweighed the other two when it came to driving traffic directly to my site. I utilized both my personal Facebook and Instagram on top of this to promote my blog posts which helped me gain a majority of my page view. This explained why social was my top channel for driving traffic. The organic search percentage resulted from my use of SEO and the paid search results came from my 4 day Google Ad campaign. My top channel was social with 75.1%, following direct with 16.7%, and organic after that with 7.9%.
- Google Ads Campaign Part of this personal branding was running a Google Ad campaign over the course of 4 days. We wrote a total of 4 ads, 2 for the home page of our blog and 2 for a chosen blog post. We set daily budgets and bids on specific keywords to help drive traffic to our site. At the end of each day I checked to see how the campaign was going, both on what was working and what wasn’t so that I could make adjustments accordingly.
- Google Ads Campaign Day 1 of my campaign I generated a reasonable number of impressions as well as clicks. I was feeling pretty good about the progress that I was making, so I made adjustments to the ads in each group that were not performing as well as the others. In an effort to reach more of my target audience and get more clicks, I paused certain keywords in each ad group to see if that would help generate impressions and clicks. I ended up getting more clicks with less impressions, and The ad group for my home page did significantly better than the ad group for my chosen blog post, and I ended up getting a few more clicks but lower impressions as the days continued. Though my numbers decreased, I felt better about spending money to reach a more targeted audience and not spending as much money on keywords if I did not have to with getting similar results.
- Twitter Analytics
- Twitter Metrics I tweeted 221 times over the course of the project, receiving a total of 101 retweets, 433 likes, 60 replies, 86 mentions, and 73 followers. I initially thought that Twitter would be the best social channel to drive traffic to my website due to the best opportunity for connection with accounts in the field, but it ended up coming up short behind Facebook. Overall, Twitter was the social platform that I posted to most consistently over the course of the project, with a few valleys in the middle due to busyness of mid-term season and a spike towards the end of the project in an effort to reach more users. I found it difficult to both find and reach my target audience through Twitter, and wish I would have been more efficient by focusing on that in the beginning.
- Twitter Analytics Report I had success in gaining a lot of impressions through Twitter over the course of the project. From this bar graph you can see periods where I had high areas of impressions including when I used tweets with lots of popular hashtags to gain a variety of users, as well as when I shared a lot of blog content. You can also see the periods that I struggled to remain consistent in the middle of the project, where I did not receive as much engagement from lack of tweeting.
- Top Tweets My top tweets consisted of content that I had shared from another creative, quotes from my latest blog of the week, as well as graphics I created myself to visually tie to the content that I had recently written about in a blog post. These were the instances where I received the highest number of impressions, which included mentions of other users, hashtags, and visual content. Overall, I received a total of 2,194 impressions from these 3 tweets alone, but not as high of engagement with only 104.
- Twitter Engagement: Who I Followed I followed influential people and accounts from the design and social media industry. I also chose to follow brands that I found had good social media design and marketing. I followed these types of influencers in order to appeal to my target audience, designers and students interested in social media, and help them understand what defined good content and design on these digital platforms.
- Twitter Engagement: Who Followed Me Though I grew a decent number of Twitter followers, I wish I would have found more followers in my target audience. I had some influential people follow me such as Creative Boom, with 94.8K followers. They are an account centered around celebrating, inspiring and supporting the creative community. Otherwise, I mainly quite a few classmates follow me, some who were also interested in design and some who were not. I also had a few college graphic design students follow me which was a success because they were included in my target audience.
- Twitter Engagement: Interactions One way that I engaged with others on Twitter was by commenting and retweeting some of their tweets. I found quite a few times that when I would get a reply from them, it would create an increase in my impressions on the tweet. This was helpful in driving a few new users to my site. I typically had interactions with brands or accounts on Twitter who shared their work that I then shared to my followers and they ended up thanking me for sharing. I mainly received mentions from other students in the course and in college who were interested in the area of design like I was.
- Other Social Networks
- Instagram Metrics I posted a total of 14 times on Instagram, receiving a total of 291 likes, 2 comments, and gaining 82 followers over the course of the project. I initially thought that I would gain more traffic to my blog through Instagram by promotion not only from my brand page but my personal page as well. I am more active on Instagram over Facebook and Twitter and thought it would be of benefit and make a difference in driving my traffic to my website.
- Instagram I utilized both my business and personal Instagram page for my personal brand to share and promote my blog. I wanted to use Instagram as a secondary network platform to drive traffic to my blog site. I was more active on ‘stories’ than I was in promoting visual content on my actual feed. Through stories I was able to share creative content I was seeing from creative brands, influencers, and friends. I cross posted all of my Instagram posts to my Facebook page as well to create a consistency across my multiple social platforms I was choosing to utilize. I also took time to create icons for the ‘highlights’ on my page. I chose to highlight design inspiration, my latest blog posts, ways people could follow me, and a section to learn about who I am and why I started my blog. I also shared stories and posts from my brand page to my personal account as well in an effort to reach more users where I already had a following.
- Facebook Metrics I posted a total of 18 times on Facebook, receiving a total of 54 likes, 33 shares, and gaining 151 followers over the course of the project. Though I initially wanted Facebook to be used as a secondary social network to drive traffic to my blog, it ended up becoming the lead source of pageviews and users over Twitter and Instagram.
- Facebook I utilized both my business and personal Facebook page for my personal brand to share and promote my blog. This was a success for engagement across all of my platforms. I found that Facebook was the best platform when sharing my blog “Interview with Lauren Nomansen.” I shared the post to my brand page and tagged both her personal and professional accounts. From here, not only did her clients and followers see my blog, but many of her personal friends and family interacted and shared my work as well. I saw significant spikes in my pageviews when I would share my blogs through Facebook.
- LinkedIn Metrics Developing my LinkedIn profile was another part of the social media project. I had 57 connections prior to starting the project and had few sections completed on my profile. I found other connections by seeking out classmates, peers, professors, and employers and grew my amount of connections to 121 by the end of the semester. I also received a total of 3 recommendations and joined 5 groups related to my industry of interest (graphic design).
- Recommendations We were tasked with requesting recommendations from professional and personal areas of our life. My first recommendation is from Chris Denison, the director of Recreation Services at the University of Northern Iowa. During my time at UNI, I worked as the graphic design intern at the WRC in Recreation Services, directly under Chris’ supervision. My second recommendation came from Schae Geiter, The Salt Company coordinator at Candeo Church. The Salt Company is a campus student ministry on the campus of UNI, this is where I worked as the junior graphic designer and managed social media during my time in college. Finally, my third recommendation came from Roy Behrens, a professor at UNI in the graphic design program. Roy was my professor for a semester during my early courses in the graphic design program in my time pursuing my bachelor’s degree. Finding recommendations from connections during my time at UNI was beneficial to ask for and now have for future employers to see when viewing my LinkedIn profile. I also found a variety of graphic design related groups to join. This further grew my network in my field of study and interest.
- Skills & Endorsements I was endorsed by fellow coworkers, peers, and classmates in my top 3 skills, Graphic Design, Adobe Creative Suite, and marketing. I also received endorsements in other industry and interpersonal skills like Social Media, Leadership, and Organization to name a few.
- Final Takeaways
- Areas for Improvements
- Areas of Accomplishment