91% Increase in Facebook Reach
200% Increase in Instagram Reach
500% Increase in Page/Profile Visits
Show, Don’t Tell
Made With Uncommon Character is a community lifestyle brand in St. Joseph, Missouri. The movement was created to inspire positivity in the city and tell stories of residents, businesses, and organizations that help shape the unique character of St. Joseph. More than that, the movement was started to create and strengthen a sense of community in St. Joseph.
In our initial social media audit of the brand, we discovered a trend in defaulting to posting about upcoming events. While that’s not bad in and of itself, we felt the brand had lost sight of its original goals and had become a glorified community calendar.
Our solution was a new content strategy that would lessen the focus on TELLING about upcoming events and would instead SHOW the success, participation, and positivity from the event. In this way, we could tell more of the event story while creating a kind of FOMO for those who did not attend.
Cast of Characters
Since the inception of Uncommon Character, it had been a faceless brand. We wanted to change that! We began workshopping ideas for recurring brand characters that would be a sort of cross section between the MTV Veejays of the early 2000’s and content you might see on a station like PBS.
The results? An outdoor hiking/biking segment with “Miles on the Trails", a history focused feature called “History with Emily”, a science segment called “Discover Nature with AnnMarie”, and a foodie segment called “Cuisine with Christine”. We also opened the door to user generated content and have featured character contributions from others in the community.
More Video
Finally, we recognized that Uncommon Character was lacking in video content, so we deployed a new content strategy that leaned heavily into video. The current social media landscape is all about video - people primarily consume their content via video and the algorithms know that, so they push it more.
We wanted to ensure Uncommon Character still maintained a gritty, grass roots feel, so we embraced a more lofi content approach with video shot on phones - specifically, video shot VERTICALLY on phones. This stylistic approach helped us maintain a more authentic feel and ensured we could open the door to content curators outside of our team members. We recognized early on that we can’t be everywhere all the time. This approach allowed us to extend our “content army” to those outside of our team - all someone has to do to contribute is take a few videos/photos with their phone and text them/email them to us.
It’s a win/win. We get more timely content to post and our contributors are able to share their unique perspective of what makes the community special.