You want to become a famous influencer or promote your product or company on social media, how do you do that? You post anything that comes to mind or pay someone to post for you every day. Unfortunately, your level of influence on social media does not have the impact you expected. The million-euro question is how you can design a campaign on social media that guarantees a significant impact and is strategic to your community. Therefore, six capstone students who study social media at AGM Creative Business are supervised by their teacher Alexandra Sierra Rativa. They have the mission of using research to find the best design to make campaigns on the most popular platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.
Sophie Verweij
“I conducted quantitative research for a video production agency called Fabel Film into the preferences of 25 to 44-years-old business owners and marketeers in Brabant regarding LinkedIn captions. In this research, I specifically focused on the length and writing style of LinkedIn captions. This way I can give recommendations as to how my company should write their LinkedIn captions or text. I measured how text on LinkedIn makes impact on entertainment, value and annoyance for users. My research concludes that short captions are perceived as more entertaining, valuable and less irritable. Also, very informally written captions (with emojis) are perceived as the most entertaining yet informally written captions are perceived as the most valuable and least irritating.”
Laura Wilkes
“I conducted quantitative research for HEMA in which I was looking for new, interactive ways to communicate the promotional flyer on Instagram stories. I had 3 different types of interactive games Type 1: Guess the product, Type 2: Guess the price, and Type 3: Calculate the price. Adding up 2 variables (open question or multiple-choice question). We had a sample of 53 women between the age of 25 to 35 years old. They had to fill out a questionnaire about perceived enjoyment and perceived intention to use. Findings were that multiple-choice questions were preferred, and the “Calculate the price” design was the best performing idea for a flyer on Instagram Stories.”
Martijn van Wuijtswinkel
“I conducted quantitative research for Videoland, which can be seen as a Dutch Netflix and I researched how to increase the user’s engagement in Instagram stories. My goal is to engage Videoland followers and then inspire them to watch new content. A feature called Meta offers on both Instagram and Facebook the interactive sticker option, which can be added to stories. Stories are short, a maximum of 15 seconds, and vertical posts automatically disappear after 24 hours. I compared the impact of the usage of the poll sticker, quiz sticker and no sticker. I found that quiz sticker is the best interactive sticker to engage their followers compared with a poll sticker and not use a sticker.”
Sanne Donkers
“I conducted qualitative and quantitative research for IKEA Breda. Here I was looking into the target audience's content preferences and the engagement effects of Instagram Shopping. I analyzed three different posts. Post 1: without product tag, post 2: with product tag, and post 3: product in Instagram Shopping. Next to that I asked questions about their opinions regarding Instagram perceptions and motivations of user engagement of IKEA Breda’s Instagram page. The main findings were that inspiration is the motivation of the target audience (both men and women between 18-55 years-old) and the post product tag provided significantly more engagement to purchase the product.”
Britt Kosterman
“I conducted quantitative research for the company Verein, in which I tested the Industrial Brand Personality on LinkedIn. I created different designs (e.g., logo, without logo, tags, without tags, hashtags, without hashtags, image with color, and image without color), and I asked their level of perception on Professional, Experienced, Sincere, Original, and Trustworthy on these posts. My preliminary results showed that people perceive a LinkedIn post with hashtags more professional, experienced, sincere, original, and trustworthy compared to a publication without hashtags. So, my recommendation for the company Verein should use hashtags (#) in their LinkedIn posts, because it can improve their industrial brand personality.“
Petya Dicheva
“I conducted quantitative research for DiVino – one of the clients of the Number One Advertising and Digital Agency. For that same client, I developed a Content Strategy, which is the essence of my capstone project. Purposefully, I researched various types of designs for wine products. I am looking to discover which design is the best for social media posts and their impact on the brand. Preliminary results showed that the design elements such as logo's, titles and small descriptions of the wine bottle is perceived as more luxurious than a post with a long text next to the wine bottle and a wine bottle without design elements around it. In this case, the design elements on the Instagram post can change the user’s perception about whether a product looks luxurious or not."
Alexandra Sierra Rativa, Supervisor of this capstone Group
“As supervisor and research lecturer of my Social Media Capstone students, I requested that my students increase their quality standards in marketing. The only way to improve their marketing strategy is by doing research. These six investigations are valuable, because they help the companies to save time. Also, they have a better understanding of how people's minds work, and which designs are effective on Instagram and LinkedIn platforms. Before posting meaninglessly on social media, I recommend that my students think about the best designs to post. I'm sure that my capstone students have learned the value of doing research before creating marketing strategies or recognizing why some marketing strategies tend to fail. Also, I am very proud of my capstone students for their great job this semester, enthusiasm, and professionalism at these six companies; Hema, Fabel Film, Ikea, Videoland, Verein, and DiVino.”
Conclusion
In the end I hope this article inspires every BUAS student to make the best out of their research. Personally, I was not a big fan of it but when Alexandra approached me with this kind of enthusiasm, I saw the best side of research. I want to thank Alexandra and all the students who participated and wish them best of luck with graduating.
