Chapter 6-2 The social media strategy for the #KommMit pilot

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6.5 Making videos for social media

The process of organising and commissioning creatives to shoot and edit the videos you want to make for the campaign needs careful planning and execution. The big lesson we have learned over the years when working with creatives is that in order to get what you want, you need to commission rather than completely outsource this work. Filmmakers who are experienced doing campaign videos have their own professional practice about what works and not. This can be a real help in guiding you to better and more practical outcomes, but it can also take you in directions that may not be a good fit for middle-oriented narrative change work. For example, we were profiling protagonists in a previous middle-oriented campaign and the filmmaker was insisting on only individual shots of protagonists. However, it is essential in such cohesion focused videos that the protagonist is portrayed together with others as part of their community. The activist team were able to communicate this clearly to the filmmaker, essentially playing a director role. Overall, you need to take a hands-on approach, taking on the director and producer roles to some extent.
 
The key steps involved in the production of the videos were as follows:

Table 14: Steps in video production in the #KommMit pilot
 
One important note: shooting these videos in a place of business such as a bakery meant coordinating closely with the partners on the ground and setting up the shots to ensure that the work schedule wasn’t disturbed. Having the opportunity to have colleagues of the protagonist in the shot who were working their shift at the time of filming also meant a significant investment in set-up time and close communications with the bakery management. This time investment yielded good results, as the best performing videos featured Ayoub together with his colleagues in the bakery.
 
The best performing videos in the pilot were A8 - Apprenticeship & Mentoring and A3 – Family Bakery. As the main intent of making videos is to create engagement, specific targets were used to measure this, and the two videos performed best in:

• Quantity of engagement with posts associated with the video;
• Number of video plays;
• Number of significant video plays (more than 15 seconds). (See table 2 in Chapter 3 for details of performance results).

The focus of these videos also goes with the copy and message that performed best (see next section).

 
6.6. Copywriting for social media ads

Writing effective copy for ads on social media is a formidable challenge given that the attention span of audiences on this platform is notoriously short and quickly scrolling through posts and ads is the norm. The team were guided by Restless Communications in generating copy for the ads for the five #KommMit videos in focus for the social media pilot. The aim of the copy was to hook the reader in to stop scrolling and engage with the ads, and actually watch the videos. The following advice on tactics and devices was most helpful for writing headlines and body copy for the ads which performed well in the pilot:

 
Generate multiple options and test to see which works best. 

This is a case when ‘more is more’, and it was worthwhile to have the opportunity to test at least four versions of copy with each of the five videos during the test & learn week. For more detail, see the copywriting framework used to develop ad copy for each of the Ayoub videos. In fact, when you put together an ad with content (e.g. a video) on Facebook Ad Manager, it is possible to put up to five options for copy to run alongside the visual content and Facebook will identify the copy that is performing the best and then roll the ads out with that best performing copy (see Table 15 below). Therefore, this provided evidence of which copy led to the best results in terms of reach/awareness, engagement, and/or traffic and ensured we were enhancing the performance of the ads at scale with the target ‘The Established’ audience. 
 

‘Less is more’ in terms of length of copy for social media ads.

The general rule from Restless Communications for readability and retention was to try to ensure that text for ads is no more than 30 words and to have visual breaks between longer sentences and paragraphs. For this task, it was helpful for the team to always have in mind someone seeing and reading the ads on Ayoub videos on their phone. Through a drafting and tightening process, as well as a range of devices (see next point), the team were able to keep the copy for the ads very concise, and well under the guide of 30 words. The following is an example of the copy approach that worked well for engagement:

Use a range of devices to hook your audience.

The copywriting team used the following devices: short questions, common metaphors or sayings, short clauses instead of always full sentences, visual cues like checklists with ticks, and numbers as striking facts. All of these devices are intended to pique the interest of the audience and draw them in to stay on the post and engage actively with the content, in this case the short Ayoub videos. The following is another example of the copy which illustrates these devices:

As mentioned above, Facebook ad Manager provides detailed feedback on the best performing copy. The following copy worked best for the three different types of ads and illustrates the range of devices used:

Table 15: Best performing copy in the #KommMit pilot
 
For more detail on the best performing copy at each level, see the 1 page overview of the results.

 
6.7 The ‘Test & Learn’ approach to the rollout

A key learning from the piloting experience was based on advice from the social media mentors, i.e. take a ‘test & learn’ approach to the social media campaign. This very much fits into ICPA’s overall empirical testing approach, but prior to this pilot, we had completed the testing phase before the rollout. The basic idea is the following: start the campaign with a test phase by putting out all the content, then stop the ads for a week in order to analyse what’s working and not, and finally adjust the approach to remove what’s not working and build on what is. The following table provides an overview of the approach in the #KommMit pilot:

Table 16: Phases in the Test & Learn approach in the #KommMit pilot
 
To illustrate the kind of adjustments made, in the set of ads for engagement, it was clear that two of the videos (A1 and A7) were not keeping people engaged in comparison to the other videos, i.e. the video plays at 75% metric in purple in Figure 5 below shows this. As a result, these two videos were dropped for the second phase of the ad spend targeting engagement. 

 
Figure 26: Key Results data from Facebook ad manager on engagement ads in the test week
 

 
6.8 Dividing the work into teams 

While the early part of the strategy development for the pilot required quite a lot of consultation as a whole group to a make sure the partners were on board, once the build out phase came, the group divided into smaller teams to work in areas they are motivated by and in which they have most competency. These groups were each made up of three people which allowed decision making to proceed quickly. Additionally, some people who had more time available for the project were in two groups at the same time. Each group had a social media expert from Restless Communications to provide feedback and shape the outcomes towards the highest quality.
 
The table below provides an overview of the three sub-groups for the #KommMit pilot:

Table 17: Working groups in the social media rollout for the #KommMit pilot
 

 
 
 
6.9 Planning your social media work

By working your way through the set of checklists using the #KommMit case and practical methods and resources provided, you will have a good foundation and informed initial ideas for planning the different aspects of a social media campaign for narrative change that can serve as a useful guide for decision making and taking this work forward in your team or your network.
 

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