Production Diary 7 - Social Icons

Mar 1

Intro

One of the most annoying things about being an artist is self promotion. It can feel ‘icky’ but it’s tremendously important to one’s success. One of the things I learned early on when making these shorts is to put some promotional call to action animations in my videos.

Let Me Holla At Ya

Why?

Well, simply because your work may or may not make it to the eyes of millions of people online, and if there’s no indication of who you are or where to find your work, you can miss out on some major chances to build your brand. Imagine you make a viral piece of content that 1 million people see and they all forget about you the next day. That’d suck!

So I spent some time a few years ago animating some of these call to action icons. I usually place 1 in the beginning of the video and 1 at the end. Usually it’s my name and the social media platforms I’m on in the beginning, and at the end it’s usually a "Subscribe/ Follow” call to action.

Not going to lie, this did make a big difference in my subscriber performance, so if you’re in the content game, I recommend doing something like that to incentive new people to follow your work.

All that said, I’ve made other animated icon's that haven’t been used. Mostly as a matter of focus on my personal milestones. It doesn’t make sense to ask people to buy merch, if I have a tiny audience, so I don’t put those call to action icons in the videos (for now).

To wrap it up, it’s important to promote yourself! No one else is going to do it. I figure I would like to do it in as little of a spammy way as possible and to make it a little interesting without taking away from the videos.

I’ve uploaded some of these animations down below along with a couple of screenshots in the after effects composition to show how they’re set up.

Thanks for reading!