I had a hunch about one of our consulting clients last month.

I was working on their social media audit and I thought they might be posting the wrong style of photo.

When working on an audit, one of my key goals is to find repeatable content formats. Templates, prompts, and/or systems that make the social media team's job easier and more fun.

When I say templates, I’m not just talking about Photoshop or Canva templates. Repeatable formats exist for any type of content.

One of my favorite examples is Vogue’s 73 Questions series. These celebrity interview videos are a very repeatable format that’s quick, clever, and keeps the viewer visually engaged. Check out the Lizzo 73 Questions here.

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Ask Simple Questions

Back to my hunch.

The client is a retail brand that mostly sells books and gifts. So most of their social content is product photos.

One really simple question we asked was “what product shot angle created the most engagement?”

If I told you to take a photo of a product for Instagram, you’d most likely photograph it one of three common ways: Front facing, overhead, or at a slight angle looking down (that’s called a 3/4 shot).

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My hunch came from something different though. It was from a few handheld product shots that they client had tried. Simply holding a product out in front of you and photographing it with a smartphone. They had not used this photo style a lot, but some of them had performed really well.

Here was the breakdown of which photo styles they used most often.

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The Surprise

The handheld product shots had also caught my attention because I've seen it work well before. American Express' entire IG feed use to be handheld photos of their cards. I’ve also seen WeWork do several handheld shots of branded swag items. Both of these got produced high engagement.

Handheld shots are a very organic way to photograph an object when posting to social. It creates a shallow focus effect that blurs the background and focuses on the main object. And it puts the viewer into the first person perspective. They become the holder, the shopper.

When we ran the numbers, the small amount of handheld photos they were posting, 10%, were by far the most engaging. They got 61% more engagement than front facing shots.

I had a hunch this would be true the first time I ever looked at their social accounts. But it was just an educated guess. We went through the data to prove the hypothesis.

One of the benefits of doing an annual social media audit is finding gems like this in the data. It’s helps you discover a better process, freeing up your time and hopefully making your job a little easier.

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To big ideas,

Jason

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​SOCIAL FRESH 2021 - June 16-18

We just announced speakers for Social Fresh 2021 (virtual!). Speakers include Lyft, Hulu, Google, Shopify, Johns Hopkins, Novartis, HubSpot, and more. Check out the full lineup and take advantage of early bird pricing.
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