1. ■ D
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November 2015
How to Leverage Your Sponsors’
Webinars to Drive Social Media
Engagement
2. About Education Week
■ Editorial Projects in
Education—the nonprofit
publisher of Education Week,
edweek.org, the Education
Week Teacher online site,
Digital Directions, and other
print and digital products—is
the leading independent
provider of news and
information in K-12 education.
3. Presentation Details
■ What is Canva?
■ Why you should use Canva
■ Our Canva Exploration
■ Do’s and Don’ts
■ Takeaways
4. What is Canva?
■ A free and easy-to-use
graphic designing website.
● Anyone can use it.
5. Why You Should Use Canva
■ Resizing capability
■ No expertise needed
■ More interactions & link
clicks
■ Extend the life of your
content
■ Freed tweet characters
■ Under 15 mins
10. Why?
■ 35.3% increase in impressions using a picture.
● +163% in engagements
● +166% in retweets
● +34% in favorites
● +333% in link clicks
**All data is from our own Twitter data
12. Canva vs. Art Department
■ 23.7% more engagements
● 39.2% more impressions than Photoshopped pics.
■ 9.1% more link clicks
**All data is from our own brand data
14. Usage Do’s and Don’ts
■ DO: Use Canvas for quotes
■ DO: Experiment with style
■ DO: Create brand templates
■ DON’T: Underestimate simplicity
■ DON’T: Only use “fun” Canvas on Facebook
**All data is from our own brand data
15. Style Do’s and Don’ts
■ Canva “Design School”
■ Style tips for beginners
21. Golden Ratio
■ Let the squares guide
each element.
■ Focus your design on
the center of the spiral.
22. Golden Ratio (Rule of Thirds)
■ Use lines and intersections to draw the viewer’s eye,
create tension, & add interest.
23. Takeaways
■ Useful for almost any workplace
■ Raise social media engagement
■ For effective Canva use
● Golden Ratio (rule of thirds)
● Meaningful color scheme
● Pair with meaningful Tweet content
Editor's Notes
This is just a quick overview of what I will be talking about in this presentation. I’m going to go through what Canva is, why you should use it, our own exploration of Canva and data we have found, what we have learned in terms of do’s and don’ts, and end with general takeaways you should have for your own organizations.
What is Canva? Basically, it is a free website that makes you a graphic designer. Whether it’s the young intern or your 60 year old boss, they can figure this out. You’re able to create clean, eye-catching pictures either from your imagination, or from pre-made templates.
You all should be using Canva in your organizations.
-Canva makes resizing for different social media platforms easy. They have the templates right there for you.
-While having a design background is helpful, generally you don’t need any design training to create a simple picture
-It puts some of the work back in your hands, and you don’t have to bother your art departments with more work
-Gain more interactions and link-clicks with Canva photos specifically
-It makes any of your pages more eye-catching
-It can extends the life of your content by making it more retweeted, and work reusing in the future.
-You’re able to include more information than a traditional tweet. By putting the bulk of the information in the picture, it frees up your tweet characters. With these extra characters you can @ important people who may then retweet it as well. You can also include relevant #hashtags to direct more people to your tweet.
-Once you’re used to the site, it takes about 5-10 minutes per picture.
Here are a few of the designs my interns created for various promotions like our Leaders To Learn From as well as our webinars. The best part—each only took about 10 minutes.
Our motto in our office is “pics or die.” If you do not use a picture, your tweet will not get nearly the amount of impressions or engagements that it could. Always try to include pictures.
Keeping here as backup in case you don’t like the following slide.
This is the reasoning that we found behind using pictures. At least for the Education Week brand, we have found that numbers across the board rose significantly when we used pictures. The impressions; however, do not increase nearly as much as the engagements. We are seeing such large numbers in engagements because users want to interact with eye-catching content. They are drawn in by the colors, and they retweet because of the content. The most important number for our brand is link clicks. Every person that clicks the link is brought to our webinar page and has the possibility of signing up. Because we used pictures, for example, a user is 333% more likely to go to the webinar page. The more effort or “action” you put into a tweet, the more likely you are to get a “reaction” in terms of retweets, favorites, or link clicks.
Here is an investigation we did of using a canva-created picture versus an Art Department picture. Our art department is in charge of creating many of the webinar promotional pictures that go up on our website and the webinar page itself. They make professional photos with our sponsors’ logos on them and basic info about the webinar. Our Canva photos; however, fill a different niche within our social media. We look to showcase quotes and thought-provoking content that appeared in a webinar. They’re more personal content-wise, and therefore need something like Canva for a personal and fun touch. While art department pictures always garner more impressions in our data, a Canva photo is 23.7% more likely to get engagements. Engagements, arguably, are more important than impressions. Especially when it comes to link clicks which raise at least 9%. The whole point of tweeting is to get users to click the link to watch our webinar. Canva is the key to getting those clicks. Why would Canva be smarter on platforms like Twitter than a professionally-made picture? We’ve found that Canvas are more eye-catching and user-friendly. Users on Twitter like to enjoy what they are consuming, so if the photos are more personable, they’re more likely to interact with it. You can see the pictures side-by-side and see what we’re talking about. Which would you be more likely to share?
Canva is much better to use on Pinterest than our traditional Art Department photos. When it comes to “pinterest worthy” photos, users are much more likely to consume relevant quotes than webinar info. They tend to like eye-catching photos that speak to their interests. Catch the user with the content of the photo, and then maybe they’ll click the link to your content. Pinterest simply won’t work the other way around. If you venture into a platform like this, be aware of what your competition is. The popular content on this site is short quotes, Do It Yourself, Cooking, and pretty landscapes. “When in Rome…do as the Romans do.” Try to fit your content to the platform instead of hoping users will adapt to what you have.
There are some basic do’s and don’ts you should be aware of when getting started with Canva. You’ll find that there are extras that are added in depending on your brand.
Do: Use Canvas to showcase quotes. They will always get more interactions, make your brand seem more personable, and spice up your page.
Do: Let interns and staff experiment with their own style for Canvas. You’ll find which works best for your brand and gets the most social media presence. The users will tell you what’s working and what’s not.
Do: Create brand templates. Especially for pictures that you want to represent your brand, you will eventually want to develop your own color-schemes and fonts for these pictures. It is a delicate balance between fun and professional, and it will take some trial and error to figure this out. Luckily, tweets are much more temporary, and if it doesn’t work, you can delete it.
In the don’ts section, it is important to understand that for a professional brand, you need to still have professional art. This can be created with Canva, but you have to adhere to stricter brand templates when attempting to create more professional photos using Canva. Simplicity is key when trying to create the most professional images to represent your brand. You also need to realize that depending on your brand, Canvas are less successful on Facebook. Our use of Canvas got 16% less reach than a more professional photo did. Basically, you have to know your audience.
It’s important to realize that Canva has their own free “design school.” This comes in the form of blogs that will teach you unique tips and tricks not only for Canva, but how to use them effectively in your social media. They also have a free newsletter with basic tips and tricks. The most important of which, we will talk about now.
Toy around with the features on Canva websites. Know what you have the possibility of recreating. See if Canva has your brand’s font. If you are really invested in Canva, you can pay the monthly fee to upload your brand’s logos, fonts, and templates for easier use. If you want to keep it free, then choose a font that will distinguish your brand online. For professional photos, attempt to stick to this same font. The best times to use professional-looking photos are for Facebook Cover photos, User profile photos on social media, any brand promotion that you’re paying for (whether on Facebook or Twitter.) You can deviate from these fonts in your quote and more “fun” pictures aimed towards Twitter though. The best feature, though, is the ability to upload your own photos. It even allows you to crop and do filter editing on the website itself.
Colors matter when trying to convey feelings about your product or even your brand. Keep these in mind when using colors and the emotions they may invoke in your audience. We use red when a quote is particularly passionate or thought provoking. We also use red to color certain words associated with negativity like “wont, don’t, no, never.” This is a good way to signify that the quote has feeling. We use blue often for our quotes that talk about our Leaders To Learn From program. We want to associate it with professionalism and gain loyalty. We also tend towards using yellow because it stimulates mental activity and catches more attention than any other color. This really stands out in a user’s Twitter feed.
This takes you back to elementary school art class. They may seem simple, but knowing which colors look good together can be the difference between a picture that’s a hit or miss. When just beginning, use your brand’s main colors. Then once you get a better handle on the colors and how they look together, then you can start branching out into analogous or complementary colors to those. The main rule of thumb for beginners is to stick to three main colors per picture.
The Golden Ratio is great to keep in mind when designing. It is a mathematical ratio often found in nature. Because of this, when one uses it in design, it makes more organic and natural looking compositions that are aesthetically pleasing. It isn’t a strict rule, but it will help you to better appeal to people’s natural instincts. By sticking to the 1.618 ratio you are better poised to get users looking and engaged. But for most of us, numbers like this don’t mean much. Let me show you in a simpler way what this means.
This is a picture of the general “golden ratio swirl.” You want your most important content to be concentrated in the light grey box. The next most important in the black, then the green, purple, light blue, and the larger picture in the darker blue. Like I mentioned before, this is not a hard-and-fast rule. These are general guidelines to keep in mind for better readability. Let’s look at an example.
Here is an example of a logo that follows the “golden rule.” As you can see, it isn’t like they tried to squeeze the writing into those boxes, they just used it as a general guideline. All important things should be in the swirl. As you may also be able to see, you can draw golden ratio diagrams on top of larger ones to help better organize smaller portions as well. This example does it in terms of the smaller bird logo. This is just better allowing you to use the negative and positive space in a picture.
The “rule of thirds” is a simpler way to understand the golden rule. This divides a picture into three different sections. Two with the width of 1 and the third with a width of .618. The smallest column should be in the middle, and the most important part of the picture should be concentrated there. In this example, the camera’s photo is the focal point of the picture because of the rule of thirds. When working in video, we always kept the subtitles in the bottom third. This is used across the board in different design-based occupations.
Here are just some of the takeaways you should have gotten from this presentation.
First, you should understand what Canva is, and be able to determine if this would be useful to enhance your organization’s social media presence
Second, user engagement will increase when you use pictures, and especially Canvas
Third, when designing Canvas:
-Choose meaningful color schemes to your brand, attempt to follow the golden ratio, and always pair your Canvas with meaningful tweet content.
-meaningful tweet content would include usernames, relevant hashtags, and usually a question or prompt for the user.
