Down the ‘Chute: Designing Engaging Graphics for Social

ENGAGING CONTENT HAS PROVEN TO BE AN EASY WAY TO INTERACT WITH FANS.

When tasked with conceptualizing a social giveaway campaign, our Evolve Pet Food team met to determine how to best execute this task. With a goal of increasing engagement, we wanted to provide a place for users to participate in the conversation. We created a set of engaging graphics: a static one that has a masked image of a dog, and a dynamic one revealing what type of breed the dog is. Users were encouraged to comment their guesses on which breed was behind the mask on the static image, then the dynamic card revealed the breed and who won the giveaway.

What was your inspiration?

Our analytics have shown that Evolve’s audience responds well to brighter colors and simple graphics. The client came to us with an idea based off of a poster that their in-house design team created with the silhouette of a dog. We took the inspiration given and ran with it to make sure that this series of engaging graphics left our audience wanting more.

What was the concept?

In addition to increasing engagement, we also wanted to take into consideration Facebook’s latest algorithm update that favors content that receives tons of comments. In the first post, I was tasked to design a graphic that asked a question. By masking the silhouette of the dog, the fans were prompted  to comment with their guesses. The copy for the post let the audience know that the answer would be revealed at a later time. This left those who interacted with the post with anticipation and expectation to find out the answer.

How did you create/ execute?

For the static graphic, I found a photo of a recognizable dog breed and clipped the dog out of the image. I used a color overlay to mask the dog, so viewers would see the silhouette and try to guess what breed it was. For the animation, posted later, I recreated the exact same graphic but in AfterEffects to add animation. I used an effect called Page Turn, to add the movement to look like the color mask it being pulled off of the image. Ta-da! It revealed the photo underneath that showed viewers what breed the dog is.

What did you learn? Any obstacles?

Honestly, the toughest part of this project was finding the perfect photo to use. The photo needed to picture an easily recognizable dog breed, specifically by their shape. In addition, the stance of the dog and the perspective of the shot were equally important because the silhouette of the dog was all the viewer was going to see. It took some time, but I really do feel that finding the perfect photo is what made this post series so successful.

What were the results?

These posts were SO well received by our audience. On the original, static graphic, the post received over 140 likes, 426 comments and 19 shares! Due to the awesome results on these posts, we’ve planned on making this a mini-series called “Guess the Breed” and post these engaging graphics every so often as a way to keep the fans engaged with Evolve’s social platforms.

If you’re stumped on a creative way to gain more interaction with your audiences on social, give us a call!