Objective

A social media report is easy to write in a way that flatters. Take the client's own figures, compare them to the client's own figures from last year, and almost any year looks like progress.

The structure is what stops that, and the structure is a design decision as much as an editorial one, where the competitor section sits determines whether anybody reads the recommendations in light of it.

Creative response

Report design.

• The Social Media Report 2020, running to a competitor section at page 11 and recommendations at page 19
• Creative content broken into five parts, output, use of media, top tweets, hashtags and promoted tweets, each given its own pagination rather than folded into one performance chapter
• News feed activity ahead of everything else, establishing volume before quality
• A cover in the group's magenta, built from a particle field, network as an image, with the group mark reversed out on a white band

Competitors at page 11 and recommendations at page 19 is the whole argument of the document. Eight pages separate them, and everything in those eight pages is read by somebody who now knows what the rest of the sector did. Put the competitor section last, as a coda, and the recommendations have already been absorbed in isolation.

Splitting creative content five ways rather than reporting it as one score does the same work at the level of detail. Output, media, top tweets, hashtags and promoted tweets fail independently, a year can be strong on volume and weak on media, and a single figure averages exactly the information somebody needs in order to act.

• The Social Media Report 2020, running to a competitor section at page 11 and recommendations at page 19
• Creative content broken into five parts, output, use of media, top tweets, hashtags and promoted tweets, each given its own pagination rather than folded into one performance chapter
• News feed activity ahead of everything else, establishing volume before quality
• A cover in the group's magenta, built from a particle field, network as an image, with the group mark reversed out on a white band

The work