Reading Time: 4 minutesPerfect, because we just landed and we are fully back online. During the last couple weeks, we have been rebooting our own social networks, breaking our old rocket and turning it into something completely different. How did we manage to do it? Well, that is exactly what I’m about to tell you, my dear astronauts.
It all started with our overall rebranding process. Yes, we had to announce it to the whole galaxy, but a social media post just wouldn’t be enough. By the time, we had recently come up with our first Angry Book draft, and, while we were checking it, we noticed that we used a really badass sentence. And, after all, we couldn’t use it if it wasn’t true.
So why not start by our own social media? Why couldn’t we knock it down? The immediate answer was “no, of course not!” We already have people following us and all rules say that we have to be regular, clear and concise. Hell! What about our lord, the all-mighty engagement? Wouldn’t we be risking too much?
But then we thought again and realized two things: 1) you can’t build a reputation of doing things differently if you don’t give it a try; and 2) we wouldn’t be really jeopardizing our engagement. Regarding the second point, we realized that what we were about to do didn’t have any negative effect on our target. Ultimately, the engagement we were looking for was not purely measured by likes and shares.
On a much higher level, what we really wanted was to spark people’s curiosity and get to a point in which our followers stopped for a minute and asked themselves what we were doing. It doesn’t matter if that user was just one. It was him we wanted! That was and continues to be our target.
And so the decision was made.
Rebooting our own social media
The hardest part came next. How could we put everything into motion? Before we start, I checked my mental list of things-you-should-do-on-social-media and found nothing about misleading messages and broke Facebook pages. Of course, I asked my really good friend Google, but he wasn’t much of a help either. Back to the previous metaphor, no one had told me how to press the destroy button of our social media spaceship!
While trying to figure out how to get things done, I was mostly worried about two things: Edgerank and link building. Given the posts we already had published, our social networks were a piece of our “old” Angry Ventures’ structure. We weren’t that regular ( you can blame it on me!), but we already had a ton of posts. How do I know they were a ton? Because I was the one who deleted them.
By the end of it, what we had was a page that looked like a recently created one. We only kept our previous profile picture and our followers. Now that our new rebranding is fully on, we invite you to check our Facebook page and slide through Angry Venture’s cover and profile picture.
Further on this blog post, we’ll explain you more details, but before we do that, can you already see what we did there?
Social media process and bankruptcy
Reboot and clean everything up. That was our first action. Because we didn’t want to “lose” our followers, we decided to delete post by post. Meanwhile, our descriptions were also changed. Until the 14th of September, the day we officially opened our new website, they were substituted by Lorem Ipsum.
One of the best reactions we had, was someone who called Fernando asking what was going on on Angry Ventures. “Did you guys bankrupted?“, he asked.
Timing was very important: we had to keep people’s attention, feeding their interest. We choose two different approaches: use GIFs to give small tips of what was going on; and make our visual transition something progressive.
Like you saw in the previous GIF, our old rocket kind of froze and them exploded into pieces. From the ashes of our symbol, a new one was born. Meanwhile, our cover image was ascending beyond the clouds and reaching into space.
Regarding our GIFs, we wanted them to show up the visual language we use on our new Angry Ventures. We also wanted them to tell a story. But how do we speak of something that is currently being revealed? First, we looked for different ways of representing errors.
“Carina, in terms of design, what do see when something has something wrong?” “An eternal loading”, she answered. Great! And when something is not over yet, what do you put there? “Easy: lorem ipsum!” And so our first two GIFs were born. After some weeks of misleading communication, we started unveiling what was going on. So, we got to our brick wall and finally set the alarm clock for the launch.
Now that the journey has ended, we consider that our mission was successful, but above everything else, we really enjoyed the process. Hope to hear your feedback, dear social media astronauts!
