AN ANIMATED TAKE ON SOCIAL MEDIA CREATIVE

This post first appeared on the CMD blog.

In a world where Facebook and Twitter feeds have become saturated with seemingly endless streams of photos, videos and other graphics, advertisers and social media users are captivated by a fresh take on brand storytelling–the cinemagraph. Seeing the potential of this unique creative format, CMD jumped at the chance to test it out for some of our clients’ social media campaigns.

But first off, what exactly is a cinemagraph? You can think of it as the younger, much better looking cousin of the infamous GIF. It’s an animated image that combines elements of video and photography, played on a loop to create the illusion of a still image, but with subtle motion effects. My measure of success for any cinemagraph is to get your audience to do a “double-take.”

For example, Iberdrola Renewables, one of our clients in the renewable energy industry, wanted to do something special for Earth Day this past April and create something that highlighted their commitment to a clean energy future. The trick was to develop something that stood out during what has become a day driven by social media. To do this, we developed five cinemagraphs, which we posted on Facebook and Twitter throughout the week, along with “#DidYouKnow” facts about renewables and the environment.

Here are three of the cinemagraphs:

Backed by a small Facebook advertising spend, this first set of cinemagraphs produced strong results.

The objective was to top this year’s previous campaign, which attracted more than 10,000 engagements. Our cinemagraph campaign exceeded these goals by more than 519% and helped us achieve a low CPC of just $0.02.

They also doubled the engagements received by a previous month-long campaign, in only five days and using only a quarter of the budget.

Still not convinced?

Due to this particular campaign’s success, we created a single cinemagraph for a tech client, which received nearly 34,000 engagements and a CPC of $0.01. To put this into context, engagements spiked by 8400% compared to the average Facebook ad for this particular client.

Are cinemagraphs are a good fit for your social content strategy? Share your thoughts and tell us what other engaging content format you’ve explored recently.