Use visuals to enhance your message

Clarify your message.

Social media thrives on our short attention spans, with the average half life of a tweet estimated at 24 minutes, and users stopping for three seconds to read them (Wiselytics, 2016). So your messaging needs to be direct, targeted and engaging.

To distill your research into social media friendly bitesize chunks, the following structure is useful:

Start with why: This research into WHAT helps address the wider problem of WHAT, that could help WHO do WHAT, because WHY.

Key findings: List 3 core findings that address the problem stated and how it could help your audience

Recommendations: List 3 practical applications of your research and how they apply to your audience

Call to action: State in one sentence what you want audiences to do as a result of seeing your post/research

These chunks are best split up into different posts – either as separate posts in the same thread or over the course of a few days, so audiences have time to see it, digest it and engage with it.