Keeping a community engaged in Social Media is a hard 24/7 job. Designing last-minute reactive posts for the two local marketplaces sister brands (Friday-Ad and Wightbay) was creating backlog issues in the Visual Design Department. This pushed the Marketing Team to start createing their own materials using templates from different online template software. However, it was generating branding and quality issues in our social media content, which is one of the first and most important touchpoints.
We organised a session with the whole Marketing and Visual Design teams before we started developing our new tool to better understand their requirements. We obtained three key insights from this meeting that we needed to address:
In order to evaluate what type of materials we would require, we also analysed the social media accounts of our competitors and reviewed all of our prior Facebook and Instagram publications over the previous two years.
With this easy to edit Template Library in Figma we provided a powerful tool to ensure that brand guidelines and consistency are always kept. The designs are very easy to edit and they automatically adapt to any size, making it perfect for publications across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more.
The designs cover as many situations and types of posts as we could need, such as marketing campaigns, platform announcements, special promotions, testimonials, partners promotions, product showcases and many more.
Social media post sizes differ from each platform and change regularly over time. It was essential to create a system that could handle this issue without taking extra time to do size variations. Through the use of Figma's Autolayout tool and Components, we made sure that the content would adjust automatically to all the standard sizes and also when the design was scaled.
The complementary colour scheme allows anybody, regardless of design experience, to choose the tones that best fit their design, ensuring that everything merges together smoothly.
The parts of the design are all quite easy to change. Your own material, including text and pictures, can be added fast. Additionally, you can batch edit a lot of assets at once utilising the main component.
The social post template collection helped us reduce our backlog by 20% and our overdue tasks by up to 60%. After a series of training sessions, the marketing team felt confident utilising Figma and the Social Post Template System. Since our marketing team could now access files that met their needs, the social media designs started to look great once more, and overall team satisfaction was very high.
Just like our product had to adapt to every circumstance, so did we. The weekly sprint-based agile framework we had proved to be unsuitable for the demands of the marketing team. We used the design thinking methodology to develop a solution that significantly streamlined the workflow of both teams.
