Case Study: Helpful social media brand guidelines for Story Planet

How guidelines helped Story Planet better understand their communications needs

Before: The challenge

Sophie Lyons had just become the Communications Manager of the Story Planet organization. One of her first priorities was to organize the marketing and communications efforts. However, there was a glaring challenge: Sophie was a small team of one.

There was another challenge: Sophie was new to the realm of marketing and communications, so there was a learning curve that she needed support with. So when I reached out, it was perfect timing:

“Jean got in touch right as we were looking to build more organization into our communications streams.”

Up until this point, the volunteers and graphic designers were posting on Story Planet’s social media accounts. However, that fact meant that there was brand inconsistency in terms of the logo and copy. Because there were no guidelines, everyone was either confused about what to do or was doing whatever they wanted, both of which are not great for brand consistency or brand identity. Sophie and the Story Planet team wanted to put an end to that, especially on social media.

The challenge: How could Story Planet create brand consistency on their social media platforms?

During: The solution

Strategy, clarity and brand consistency were my answers, and Sophie and the Story Planet team agreed.

Strategy

Since social media was a priority, I immediately began a social media audit upon which I would craft a strategy. I located all of the social media accounts and the audited them in terms of content and brand messaging. I evaluated the bios, posted content, hashtags and metrics such as likes, comments and shares. When I got this information, I analyzed their analytics and discussed goals and objectives with them.

Once I had a clear picture of the socials, I reported back, made some recommendations, offered some best practices and then created a social media strategy. The strategy included an alignment of organizational goals, communications objectives and key performance indicators. It also included details about their target audiences, particularly what they cared about, content they engaged with the most, social media platforms they most frequented. This part is where the analytics came in handy.

“It was such a huge help and breath of relief to have someone else keen to do communications stuff and building that and having someone else driving it because I was being pulled in a million different directions.”

From here, I provided some best practices, tactics to try and schedules to follow in terms of posting. When the strategy was completed, clarity came next.

Clarity

Clarity: A strategy is more useful when you have guidelines that help you enact it. Why? Less fuss, less confusion, less disagreement and less time wasted. It was clear that Sophie needed something that would help her focus on her priorities as the Communications Manager and reduce the number of interruptions to that focus.

I created social media guidelines that included information about language, audiences image sizing, messaging, hashtags, how to respond or comment, sharing parameters and more, all per platform. By making guidelines per platform, Sophie and the Story Planet would experience less long decision-making about their social media and more quick referencing of their social media guidelines.

Now, it was time to create the brand guidelines.

Brand consistency

Brand consistency: The goal was to give people something to reference that answered their questions and reduced back and forth conversations. The Story Planet brand guidelines included details about text, headlines, font, do’s and don’ts about logos, image sizing, colours, language use, sentence length, tone and voice.

After: The results

As a result of this work, Sophie had a cleaner schedule because it no longer included questions from graphic designers and volunteers about how they should post their work. The brand guidelines created more consistency and the social media guidelines provided an increased understanding of where to focus and how to boost online engagement. Alongside the other two documents, the strategy helped Story Planet realize a massive addition to their team:

“With having these documents, were were better able to understand our needs moving forward and hired a dedicated social media coordinator. Jean also provided copy for them to use while they’re still finding their footing in the organization.”

When I checked in with Sophie later after the project was completed, she told me that her team are referencing the documents everyday because they were the push the team needed to get their communications aligned. Moreover, the coordinator has been building on the documents and sending reports every month to ensure everyone is on the same page. And they have been!

Reflection

Outsourcing communications because you’re just too busy isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s a challenge just like any other that has a simple solution. Whoever you decide to work with should be able to make that solution a reality with knowledge, expertise and structure. Otherwise, the story they tell you about your communications will be incomplete.

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