By: Brittney Stalvey, JSA Consulting LLC.
Society’s rapid decline in our ability to focus has left us looking at social media a little differently. We have almost no attention span, and what little we do have we sacrifice to endless “doom scrolling” as it has unflatteringly been called. We’re literally scrolling our lives away… but that’s a separate article. In this short piece, I’m going to explain how you can cater to our tendency towards easy distraction and why utilizing carousels for your business is the way to go.
What is a Carousel?
A carousel is a multi-image or multi-video post that showcases cohesive thoughts within a single, swipeable post. This allows content creators and businesses to deliver a message in bite size pieces, forcing the users to swipe (or click for desktop platforms) to see the next piece of information. Carousels often outperform reels and are vastly more successful than single-image posts, let’s discuss why.
Why Swiping is Important.
Because those utilizing carousels have their information broken into multiple images, the user must swipe to see the complete thought of a single post. Swiping means more engagement. You know what the owners of social media platforms like? They like engagement. Higher engagement means their users are on their platforms longer. (And if their users spend more time with them, they can display more ads and make higher profits.)
It’s for this reason that platforms like Instagram and Facebook prioritize posts that generate higher engagement. There is a load of science behind this practice, and it’s all quite interesting. A good film to watch if you want a deeper dive into how some of these platforms were created (and how they control us) is The Social Dilemma. All you need to know is that if you can get your customers to interact with your posts for longer, then social media platforms will show them to more people because you are driving the results they are interested in.
How to Design an Effective Carousel.
Generally, carousels are a single thought, a series of related thoughts, or a story shared over multiple images or videos. They are highly interactive because the audience can’t glance at all the information at once, they must swipe or click to see the full message.
Step 1: Pick a layout or design. You want each slide to look somewhat consistent. This may mean the same color or background image. Canva is a free online tool that is tremendous for creating all sorts of collateral, including social media posts.
Step 2: Create an intriguing title slide. The first slide in your series should introduce the overarching idea, pose a question, or lead into a compelling story. The key to this slide is to make users want to read more.
Step 3: Include your branding on each slide. If your follower(s) choose to share your carousel to their stories, they will only be able to share one slide unless they manually share multiple ones. Incorporate your branding and specifically your social media handle (ie. @jsaconsulting) on each slide so their viewers know where the information came from and can follow you.
Step 4: Make content that’s shareable. A good standard for anything you post is to make it informative, funny, entertaining, etc. The goal is to get your followers to find what you’re saying valuable enough to share with their followers.
Give carousels a try and see if your engagement and overall social stats start improving. Remember, JSA Consulting specializes in creating original content for businesses across the globe. Give us a call today for a free 15-minute consultation.
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