Social media creative

Social media is a predominantly visual medium, which means visually engaging creative is essential. It’s important to try different approaches to visually representing your brand and messages, however there are some best practice approaches that will set a strong foundation for your content.  

Social media professionals are often asked to publish content that isn’t right for their platforms, audience or objective. Often this is due to a gap in understanding what works well for social media and your audiences. Help internal stakeholders understand the reasoning behind content decisions (and what you need from them to help meet their objectives). Try using platform data, A/B tests, training sessions, lunch and learn events, factsheets and industry publications to educate and empower colleagues. 

General

In general, for both video and images, it’s best to:

• design for mobile-first
• use the right file size and dimensions for the platform
• create social-first images (that is, make assets specifically for the platform, rather than using television commercials, web banners or flyers)
• make sure the copy and creative are linked and complement one another
• choose creative informed by customer insights and what has worked on your page before.

Videos

When storyboarding and writing videos for social media:

• know who your audience is and target your content to them directly
• use simple, direct language and avoid jargon
• tell a good story
• stick to one key message per video
• deliver the most important messages early in the video, as social viewers watch less than 50% of videos over 6 seconds
• feature people in the first few frames so you can connect emotionally with your audience
• consider putting a call to action and other contextual information in the post text instead of in the video
• keep videos short and snappy (we recommend reviewing your platform's watch times to see how long your audience is likely to watch your videos).

When designing and producing videos for social media:

• follow the recommended specs (including aspect ratio, video length and style) for each platform your video will appear (there is no one size fits all rule for all platforms). Check SproutSocial’s video specs guide.
• safe zones or the specific areas on the screen where important content should be placed to avoid being cut off by text, buttons or preview cropping, apply to Instagram Reels.
• videos with dialogue should have captions for accessibility and for audiences who prefer to watch with sound off
• avoid using text outside of captions and supers, unless you’re creating an infographic or diagram
• choose an enticing custom thumbnail that will grab users’ attention
• pick the right keywords for your video title (for example, “How to write captions” rather than “captions_youtube_v4_FINAL").

See the Brand Toolbox for further guidance on creating videos using the NSW Government brand framework, including base templates. 
 

Captioning videos

From a NSW Government branding perspective, captions on social media videos should: 

• use Public Sans or Arial as the font, if available
• be large enough to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (no smaller than 9 pt) 
• not take up more than 20% of the screen
• not cover any vital information or branding or supers (meaning they may need to move up or down the screen at different times)
• always be reviewed before you publish the video.

See the accessibility section for further guidance.