Learning Through Social Media

As good designers, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our skills, enhance our knowledge base, and learn about something new. Today, more than ever before, social media has become a conduit for learning and teaching online. The benefits of teaching through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Youtube, and Instagram are many and include the ability to review and make edits of recorded lessons, reach a wider audience than you would in a traditional setting, and obtain reviews that could potentially help your business gain more customers. As a learner, you are able to become more aware of educational content that may be useful to you, view reviews and ratings for the content to help you make the best decision when it comes to choosing who you will learn from, and benefit from flexible learning due to the 24/7 availability of accessing the content. Not to mention, a lot of educational content is free to the user like a lot of what you might find on Youtube due to the payment methods and policies they have in place with the person who posts the content.

When you attend an accredited university, you know as a student that you can trust that the information you are receiving in class from your instructors is correct and current, but how do we as social media consumers know if the information shared on social media is accurate? What if it’s a scam? As we all probably should know, just because there is a post that claims something or shares a lovely quote by someone, we can’t always be certain that what we are seeing is valid. On the same note, it has become more and more of a taboo to share or like posts that include misinformation, so before we share – we check. The same thing goes for educational material on social media; we must check out the source and if possible check reviews from other users to see if we can validate the content and the individual teaching it. If you don’t do your due diligence this way, you may fall victim to a scam resulting in your personal data being hacked, money fraud, and many other unfortunate consequences.

There is no doubt that in the 21st century, social media is a prevalent force enabling users to express their thoughts, voice their opinions, and connect to each other anytime and from anywhere. The appeal of social media as a learning platform is in large part due to the ability to participate by viewing, creating, and sharing content and the knowledge it offers. Learners are also able to share their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, and cultivates a user-centered environment that is social, personalized, and interactive. As an educator, and yes if you’re teaching how to do something online then you to are an educator, it’s important to recognize that successful learning outcomes depend on the goals and objectives that drive the design of instructional strategies and the selection of social media platforms. Not every platform may be best suited to learn from just the same as not every platform may be the best choice to share particular educational content. I have linked some of the best tools for sharing content and what type of content is below. This list will help you whether you are seeking something new to learn or a way to share your knowledge and skills.

Social Platforms and Learning Content List

Facebook Page: use for broadcasting updates and alerts. Familiar alternative to having users download and learn how to use another messaging platform like Slack. Instructors can use it to post class updates, share assignments and encourage discussion.

Facebook Group: use to stream live lectures and host discussions. Instructors can also post discussions, assign homework and make class announcements here.

Twitter: use as a message board or discussion board. The 280-character limit makes students/users think critically about communicating concisely and effectively which is another beneficial skill. Teachers can also create discussions and Twitter chats surrounding a specific hashtag that they create.

Instagram: use to present a series of photos or graphics in a visually appealing way. Instagram allows students to practice digital storytelling in ways that other social media platforms do not. As a learner, you can create a class-specific account and then delete them after the course has been completed if you choose.

Blogs: create a class blog for discussions. There are many different platforms available such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Blogger, and more. Learners can create their own user accounts to make discussion posts or add comments on class prompts. Blog posts as essays or short-form writing is another strategy for combining social media and learning. Learners can respond to weekly prompts making it as informal and loosely structured as possible as well as this method can be transferred across all subjects.

Pinterest: create a class-specific Pinterest board where you as the instructor can save pins that are relevant to the lessons you are teaching. It’s a great platform to help instructors prepare and organize resources, lesson plans, and worksheets in one place. For learners, it’s useful to curate a digital bibliography for research projects, papers, or group assignments. Learners can pin websites, books, or videos to a board on a single topic and refer back to it when it’s time to write.

Youtube: used to teach and to learn by sharing content and viewing that content. Instructors can share their structured videos of their content, gain followers and ratings as well as answer questions or give feedback to viewers. Learners can access the content by searching for a specific topic, viewing the top content creators for that subject, interacting with other learners and the teacher, subscribe to the instructor to stay up-to-date on their latest content uploads, as well as access it at any time from anywhere.

LinkedIn: similar to YouTube, LinkedIn allows for the ability for professionals to share their wealth of knowledge for free or at a price. Learners can again have unlimited access to the content and know that it comes from a reputable source. Learners can follow the instructor, message them directly, and even connect with other learners.

Final Thoughts

Social media for learning allows learners to gain a sense of community and belongingness. It also is the fastest way to contact people or share crucial information. As an instructor, it can help you make your approach more student-centered. Social media is easily accessible and most modern-day learners have a digital presence already making them highly familiar with the ins and outs of social media platforms.

So, embracing social media and incorporating its features into the teaching and learning processes can have a positive impact on learners. Instructors can provide video lectures, and quizzes, tag learners, and have them participate in group discussions. In this way, learners will not only gain knowledge in an interesting and engaging way but will also get the flexibility to learn from wherever they want and whenever they want.

Business was forever changed with the introduction of social media. Companies can now use several innovative methods to connect with their audience all around the globe, and graphic design plays a major role in making that happen. Popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more allow businesses a platform to help them stand out from the crowd and grow relationships with new and existing customers. Imagery is a huge factor in that success and according to Hubspot, a top source for digital marketing strategy, people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than those following without graphics or pictures. If you’re struggling to engage your audience, ask yourself if your marketing includes graphics, and then take a look at some of the best brands that excel at incorporating graphics in their marketing strategy.

Six of the best brands that I can think of that really nail graphic design for social media are Spotify, Starbucks, Oreo, Mailchimp, Netflix, and Shopify. In 2020, Spotify came out with their #2020wrapped campaign as a way to grab their audience’s attention. More than just a social media hashtag, it showcased Spotify users’ most-played songs, favorite bands, and podcasts in an easily sharable, clean, and simple-looking infographic. Starbucks, while they lack fair wages and treatment of partners, does not lack in graphic design material. In the image below from their 2020 fall campaign, by adding the phone, you as an audience member are now not just looking at another coffee and Fall aesthetic photo, but something interesting that you want to learn more about. It’s unusual and so now you simply must read the subject matter and find out that there is an 800 number to call to order your Pumpkin Spice Late for delivery.

The article 5 Ways To Engage Consumers On Social Media in this week’s reading list claims that by using humor on social media, you can increase engagement with current customers and grow your follower count when people share your post with their friends. Oreo does an excellent job of cleverly using images of their product in different funny scenarios that match a current trend or message. In this image Oreo designers showcase their Graduation Oreos during the Spring of 2022.

Just a few more graphics that sparked some humor or showed a great design for interest:

It’s pretty clear that graphic designers are integral to excellent marketing strategy. We must be clear that while there are tools for non-designer marketers to use to help them incorporate graphics in their social media strategy, marketers are not versed in design concepts or the principles of design. If you’re looking for a way to incorporate more graphic design in your social media outreach, consider adding a graphic designer or two to your marketing team – you can thank me later!

Have you become more engaged in politics due to exposure to social media? When you think about how social media has been impacted by politics, it’s pretty easy to imagine that what first drew your attention was an image whether that image was taken with a camera or digitally designed. Effective communication begins with the visual and is enforced by what is written or talked about regarding that image. Effective imagery encompasses colors that depict the mood of the topic, icons that are universal, and sometimes even phrases or slogans that simply and clearly explain the topic. Today I want to discuss what makes an effective social media campaign and how designers play a pivotal role in helping campaigns succeed, as well as our responsibility as designers to design with integrity and truth.

As we all know at this point, people in politics lie. They blatantly lie or omit truths so that their arguments prevail over facts and reason. So what about political campaign ads? Can they lie in those also? The short, unfortunate answer is yes. The Honest Ads Act was a bill in the United States Senate intended to regulate online campaign advertisements by companies. The bill was proposed on October 19, 2017, as a response to Facebook’s disclosure of Russia purchasing political ads during the 2016 United States presidential election. The Honest Ads Act was eventually incorporated into the For the People Act, which passed the House but stalled in the Senate during the 116th and 117th Congress. As designers, we have a responsibility to turn away a paycheck when it comes to false or misleading information being presented to the public as truth. Any designer who is willing to subscribe to shady practices should be held accountable and while the United States has attempted to wrangle this problem, we have sorely fallen short.

Now that we are designing campaign ads responsibly, let’s talk more about what makes for great social media design for political campaigns. Similar to the thought process behind creating excellent marketing campaigns for social, designers can also consider five main things when planning a political social media campaign: if this is not your first time, audit your previous social media performance, define your campaign goals, create audience personas, identify distribution channels and key times to post and last, check out your competitors.

Audit your previous social media performance:

Carefully review the metrics from each social channel you used so that you can see where and how you have generated leads, driven traffic to your website, gained social follows, and increased conversions – in this case a conversion could be considered as signing up to vote, signing a petition or subscribing to an email list or newsletter. Tracking these metrics helps you and your team understand whether or not you have been successfully meeting your goals.

Define your goals for the year:

Think about the goals you have and try to break them down into categories that align with your wider goals. If you want people to sign a petition, donate to the campaign, and engage on social media, you might categorize your goals in two ways: branding goals and revenue-linked goals. For branding goals, you might include how many people you want to reach within a time frame, how many relationships you create, post engagement for the month, how many shares you acquire, etc. Revenue-linked goals might look something like how many sign-ups you received in a month or how much money you raised in a certain amount of time. Remember to always keep your goals SMART too. That is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, so that you can gauge your performance.

Create audience personas:

Sure, why not? If you are trying to raise funding and awareness for your campaign, as a designer you know how to create user personas and they can be very helpful when trying to reach certain demographics at certain times. Do you need millennial buy-in? Well, take a look at when they’re on social, what the typical millennial is up to during a routine day, and when you will most likely be able to reach them. Know your audience through personas by identifying their struggles and pain points. Are they worried about fires? Polluted water? The ads designed with those concerns in mind will help you target those groups. Many millennials are parents now, so maybe they’re worried about their child’s education and gun regulation. Your candidate is pro-gun reform and education funding so now go design the eye-popping ad that will create awareness and hopefully lead to donations for your campaign.

Identify distribution channels and key times to post:

When trying to reach your audience, knowing what social media platforms they use and what times they use them can increase the likelihood that your campaign ads will be seen. According to Statista, in 2020, 59% of marketers said that Facebook was their most effective social channel, with Instagram at 17%, LinkedIn at 14%, Twitter at 3%, and Pinterest at 1%. That gives a good big-picture view, but knowledge of how your own brand and audience interact on social is even more powerful. Know where your audience goes and when they’re most likely to see your ad.

Check out your competitors:

Who are your closest competitors? Which social media channels are they using? How are they successful? How are they missing the mark? What type of content are they producing and how effective is it? Where do they need to improve? A type of “social media listening”, reviewing your competition is an effective way to monitor the sentiment around your competitors’ campaigns. Then take these gained insights and implement better ways to inform your social media campaign design strategy.

Resources:

Statista

HubSpot and Semrush have additional resources and articles related to marketing strategy that can be useful for campaign design strategy as well.

It’s probably not surprising that perhaps the best way to incite engagement on social media is by using visual aids. Graphic designers are probably thinking, “Well, yeah – that’s obvious!” – however, marketing efforts have increased their visual communication to include more than just text, moving or not, to catch the attention of their audience in recent years. In fact, according to a Wyzowl Survey taken in 2020, 80% of marketers include visual images in their social efforts, 63% use video, and 35% have embraced live video. Visual communication can set a mood, emphasize information and even make subjects more fun and intriguing due to their emotional appeal. When I think of the many ways in which I have designed for informational purposes I think of event announcements created for social media, video ads that I drew and animated, infographics, and typographic posters that I designed with movement and visual stimulus.

Think about reading an invitation – maybe it’s an email, and it’s all text and nothing is pictured and there are no visual aids or emphasis being made. How likely are you to retain the information on that invitation? For someone like me who is a big fan of visual aids, I would have to probably print it and post it to my fridge so I wouldn’t forget…then probably forget anyways. So, when it comes to social media engagement, it makes sense that you will capture not only the attention of your audience better with visual communication, but that they will also more likely remember what the post was about.

Looking at visual communication in social media from another angle, have you ever noticed that some Instagram users’ profile pages are nicely color-coordinated and have a similar aesthetic from post to post? Well, what purpose does that serve to have your page unified looking? Why should I care if my Instagram posts are pretty or have a theme? A good example I could give to help answer these questions is logo design. While having a logo doesn’t make a brand better or a business successful or tell the full story of what a company is about, what a logo does do is create awareness and recognizability. This branding can build trust, credibility, and understanding and without it, the elements of your business would lack unity and ultimately lead to confusion for your audience.

Like a business with a successful logo design, successful IG users, (and I would say successful could mean they have lots of engagement, followers, likes, and purchases), typically have clear messaging and they are easily visually recognizable as you scroll through Stories and Reels. So from adding visual stimulus to the mundane to creating a cohesive, unifying visual design, I think it’s safe to say that social networking is elevated when visual communication is realized.

Being a woman who has grown up in the digital age, I can honestly say that I have retouched many a photo before posting it to my social media account. Today, I was asked why I chose to filter or alter my photos and that is a question I, up until today, never wanted to sit down with myself and ask. The harsh truth is, however, that I often think I look ugly or fat in the photos that people take of me. When I take the photos, I have the control to chose which one I like best and then to even alter it still to make myself look more beautiful. The sad truth is that I know I’m far from being alone. For many generations before me, women have been dressed by men from the design of their clothes to how they should behave and look at all times. In the 21st century, although we have hard won freedoms, we are still being subjected to the pressure to look “perfect” from the magazines we read, to the pictures we see of famous women, to the photos we ourselves feel compelled to alter just to feel some self esteem.

In France any “commercial” image of a model whose bodily appearance has been digitally or otherwise altered has to be labeled “photographie retouchée,” or retouched photograph. My friends, I think France has got the right idea, but it’s just a start. Why do we retouch photos on a grand scale like this in media? The age old moniker “sex sells” is probably part of it, but money seems to me to be the real root of evil here. If you as a woman, or a man or non-binary person, see someone who looks like you and they’re photo shopped to have perfect skin or the perfect figure, you might not feel so great about yourself. Oh and the one who has perfect skin, well that add is probably selling make-up or acne medication. It’s all a ploy to get you to buy that new piece of gym equipment or membership, get the tan, buy the car or whatever else. America, I think it’s time we said enough.

One bit of good news for anyone tired of comparing themselves to the impossible epitome of perfection is that we might start seeing less of touched-up images. Getty Images, the largest stock photo agency in the world, has declared that it will no longer accept images “depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger.” My hope is that they would also do the work to remove any images already in their database of edited photos, however I am certainly applauding this effort to change the image of people back to a realistic one. We need to perpetuate a society that loves people just as they are, one that praises imperfections and one that teaches us to love our bodies. One day my husband and I would like to have children and I never want my child to feel like they are inadequate. We need to push this movement forward and encourage all of our idols and media platforms to get rid of the fake and bring in the real.

If you would like to contribute to the cause, I researched some great organizations who are helping to win this battle of self-love for us. Just check out the links below!

https://abc7news.com/fatkini-fat-shaming-curvy-plus-sized/252490/ – “Fatkini” Hashtag went viral in support of women in all sizes looking beautiful in bikinis. Some photos are still altered or filtered, but there is still some groundbreaking improvement here.

https://www.curvykate.com/ – Lengerie for women with them curves! Holy Jesus, it’s about time.

https://now.org/now-foundation/love-your-body/ – You can donate to this awesome foundation who promotes healthy self-talk and love for your body at any size.

https://www.instagram.com/feministunicorn/ – Instagram sensation, she shows how great she is and how confident she is, unfiltered.

Resources:

Dent, S. (2020, February 28). Getty bans images photoshopped to make models look thinner. Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-27-getty-bans-photoshop-images-models-thinner.html

Friedman, V. (2017, May 8). A New Age in French – Modeling. Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/fashion/france-laws-thin-models.html

McKelle, E. (2015, April 15). 9 Social Media Campaigns That Are Changing Fashion. Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.bustle.com/articles/75539-9-body-positive-social-media-campaigns-that-are-changing-how-we-perceive-beauty-both-in-and