Emilie Ackerman

Right now, I am working on my Medium.com article “How Disney Channel and Nickelodeon Create Lifelong Fans” and I am thinking about different ways to promote it. Since social media is the most popular way people consume content nowadays, I created different social media ads across LinkedIn, Instagram, and X to encourage readers to click on it.

Instagram:

Usually when I am on Instagram, I do not like to read too much and I like to look at graphics so I created a graphic on Canva that I think would catch the viewer’s eye. Not only that, I thought of the demographic of the people who would see this post would be and knew it would mainly people in their twenties. Because younger people have shorter attention spans, I knew color would be very important in trying to capture this audience’s attention. I also made the “Disney Channel” and “Nickelodeon” texts bigger to capture the viewer’s eye of what the post was about and included purple and yellow backgrounds. I also put a question at the top of the graphic to encourage users to engage with the post.

Caption:

As for the caption, a lot of my followers are either around my age and younger so I want sound more like a friend than being too formal. To do this I write in the first person and even include some emojis to make it a more personal and fun.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn, usually it is more news oriented so I felt that I needed to clearly show in the graphic that my piece is from Medium.com. Because of this, I put the Medium.com logo in the bottom right corner so people can clearly see that it is a link to a full article. In the graphic, I also included a collage of Disney and Nick shows so to immediately catch the audience’s eye. Since most people on LinkedIn are very busy with their lives, I knew it was important to immediately capture their attention as for any other social media platform. To do this, I also made sure my post encouraged conversation and interactivity since the LinkedIn algorithm favors this. By including a question in the graphics as well as the caption, I know this helps increase the chances of people responding to the post to help maximize reach to people in the media and marketing industries.

Within my caption, I also encouraged more interactivity by making the post inclusive to people of all ages in the entertainment marketing industry, even if they are not Millennials or Gen Z. I do this by making my caption general to the whole audience asking “what show defined your childhood?”

Twitter / X:

For X, I made a short, punchy post as people are always scrolling fast through their feed on social media. To stop my audience from passing my post, I started with the question “Remember your favorite Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows?” This draws the person’s attention and immediately sparks nostalgia and engagement. The post also uses some emojis and hashtags to reach the target audience (Millennials and Gen Z).

I also attached an eye catching image of the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon logos so the audience knows immediately what the article is about without even the caption. By keeping the post concise, interactive and visually interesting, I optimized it for engagement on X.

Making these posts for my article made me aware of how there can be different audiences for each social media platform so it is important to put the right graphics and effective captions for each platform. Keeping all of this in mind can encourage and result in higher engagement rates for posts.