- Right now in the studio we have Daniel Carter, social media strategist,

who’s going to give you all some advice about how to improve your status
updates, visually speaking. Hi, Daniel. Welcome!
- Hi Megan, it’s good to be here.
- So where do we start with this?
- Well, most people are kind of lazy when it comes to their updates. They tend
to post the same kind of images and, consequently, their likes go down as
they all get a bit repetitive and your friends get tired of that. I think the
important thing is to imagine what kind of response you want to evoke with
your image: is it going to be something emotional, that’s going to make
people laugh or cry, or something informative that will make them reflect, or
something more social, like a meme?
- Good advice. And what should people post? I guess photos, right?
- Well, yes, let’s deal with photography as that’s the most common. If you’re
on holiday, for example, and you want to take a photo to impress your
friends, think about the overall composition, don’t just take a snapshot. The
landscape format usually looks better, but also find a different angle if you
can. For example, you could take a close up of a certain detail. Why not to
stand on a bench or sit on the floor to take a shot? The angle or perspective
will be different for sure.
- Great. Anything to avoid?
- Well, the usual, don’t take photos of other people without their permission
and don’t use a flash unless you really need to, and try to avoid blurred or
dark images, this won’t go down well on social media. Also think about how
you can crop the image, you know, remove parts of it and so on or enhance
it with filters or whatever. Also the combination of image and text is good.
This is very easy to do with digital tools like Photoshop, but make sure the
text is big so that it will be visible when people are scrolling through the
images online; it gives the image a nice meme-like quality.
- That all sounds good, but you haven’t spoken about the subject matter of
these images much.
- I think that’s all very personal. We all know that posting a cute picture of
you and your dog is going to get plenty of likes, more than a post about a
charity you believe in. But it’s not for me to tell people what to post on their
social media page. But as I said keep it varied and you’ll come across as
more interesting.

Questions:
1. That people are a bit lazy when doing their updates. They often post very
similar images and they are not interesting to followers.
2. It is important to imagine what kind of message you want to convey: is it
something emotional, something informative or more social.
3. To think about the overall composition, landscape. You can close up of a
certain detail. He also advises not to take photos of other people without
their permission, not to use flash unless you do not need to and avoid dark
and blurred images. Also to think how you can crop an image or enhance it
with some filters, think about the combination of text and picture but text
should be big enough to see it and understand.