When you give someone a gift, do you think about the wrapping?
I do.
Wrapping, especially if it is personalized, adds an important component to your gift: emotion! Not only the pleasure of receiving, but a moment of discovery, of impatience to know what is hidden inside. Imagine that your social media posts are gifts; if the packaging is not attractive, your interlocutors will probably set it aside to “watch later”, or even not watch it at all!
Form is therefore as important as content. Politicians seem to have understood this. The importance given today to what is called “personal branding” testifies to this. I remember a quote from a candidate in the 2015 regional elections: “I take care of my image out of respect for the citizens.” She is absolutely right! The visual aspect alone, “I like it or I don’t like it,” is very important for voters’ choices. Furthermore, by voting in elections, we choose the women and men who represent us and with whom we might wish to identify (…or not). Image therefore constitutes an important part of personal and professional credibility.
During the last election campaign, I went through an in-depth benchmarking phase of the different candidates. And believe it or not, I was quite surprised by the results. In particular, there is a gap between the “physical” meeting with the candidates and their image on social networks. When you meet a local official, generally, their speech is prepared, mastered, and successful, but the photos that remain on social networks are not up to standard! If you pay attention to the photos on the social networks of politicians, you will notice that for many of them, they are blurry, poorly framed, unselected…
Yet this is one of the objectives of the politicians who engage on social networks: to attract new people to their pages to build loyalty and engage in a dialogue via impactful content. The packaging is therefore very important to catch the reader’s eye; publications must therefore be interesting but also pretty!
Here are some simple but nevertheless very important elements to keep in mind for managing images on political pages on social networks:
- Sort through and check that the official is shown to their advantage!
- The “raw” photo is rarely 100% successful; it must therefore be retouched!
- Framing, framing, and more framing! The neighbor’s hand or a bottle of water have no place in the photo!
- Contrast and brightness improve in a few clicks; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer filters to make your task easier! Use them!
- Adding a message via a collage application will turn your photo into a true personalized communication tool!
There… Now all that’s left is to produce content. More to come in the next episode.
