Chat's Life - inspiring conversation with graphics on social

CONVERSATION is the spice of online life, and we social media managers are always looking for ways to get people talking.

I'm luckier than most - because I work at a national newspaper. That means there is usually plenty of interesting, provocative content to get our followers going. 

Original graphic: Simple, but effective

But a simple question written into a tweet with no image and no context is likely to get ignored by most people, regardless of how great the story is. 

On our team, we decided that wouldn't do - we needed to make the question itself more engaging.

So here's what we did.

The Sun's website had been running "Have Your Say" articles for some time, and we thought it would be a good idea to try to translate this concept onto social media. 

Roxanne: This was my first go at making a graphic. Unfortunately, I saved it as a jpeg (rather than png)
file so the text looks a bit wobbly. But it still had a great response from followers

The first - and most obvious - thing to do was create a hashtag from the title. This would give continuity to our feed and mean regular readers would come to expect the #HaveYourSay tweets.

Baby steps: The drop shadow is improved on this one and the hashtag reads better

We then started to work on some ideas for graphics. The hashtag itself on a Sun red background in a Sun font was the first idea, which worked OK - but I thought we could have a bit more fun with it. 

Big head Barlow: If you've read my previous blogs, you'll know I find over-sized heads hilarious.
This is no exception.

So the next idea I had was to use a graphic (600x300 pix) which had the hashtag, a question and an picture from the story we were referring to. This would show the question and the context in one concise, eye-catching, shareable image.

Translucent juice: I had to cut out the beer from the middle of the glass on this one, then increase
the transparency so you can read the words through it. I think it works well.

We now try to do these as often as possible, and move the words and pictures around to keep it interesting. But, of course, the style (ie. colour and font) remain the same to give consistency to the concept, and to make it more recognisable.

Food for thought: I experimented with a larger picture on this with an added outer glow. The words
also have a black stroke, which I hadn't done on any of the others. I'm still undecided on whether
I like it or not. But it is certainly striking. 

What do you think? #HaveYourSay!