A feed designed as a grid, not a queue

A retail chain with twelve stores, posting five times a week, and a feed that looked like five different companies. Everything was on brand individually. Nothing was on brand together.

A feed is a grid before it is a queue

Posts are made one at a time, so they get designed one at a time. But almost nobody sees them that way. A person who hears about the brand opens the profile and sees nine squares at once, and forms an opinion in about a second, before reading a single caption.

That is the view the work has to hold up in. So the feed is laid out nine at a time, a fortnight ahead, and approved as a block. If two product shots on the same ground would land side by side, one moves. The individual post is designed second.

The client's own phrase after the first month: the profile finally looks like one shop rather than twelve.

Four post types, and permission to be boring

Rather than inventing a format every week, there are four: the product on a plain ground, the lifestyle shot in store, the idea post with no product in it, and the people post from behind the counter.

Four templates sounds like a constraint on creativity and functions as the opposite. Nobody spends Monday deciding what shape the week is; they spend it deciding what to say. It is also what makes the grid work, because a repeating rhythm across nine tiles is a design rather than an accident.

The people posts consistently draw the most replies, which is the sort of thing you only learn once you are posting a consistent set and can compare like with like.

Captions are written, not appended

Both languages, written by someone who has read the previous four weeks, with one idea per post. A caption that restates the picture is wasted, and a caption that asks a question the brand cannot answer in replies is worse than wasted.

What changed, and what did not

Followers up thirty eight percent in a quarter, twenty posts a month, and no change to the media spend. The reach came from the work being consistent enough to be remembered rather than from paying to put more of it in front of people, which is the difference between a social budget and a social strategy.