Seven inclusive social media strategies you can use today to boost your message

Over the course of the last nine months or so, we’ve been talking quite a lot about ways to design presentations that are more inclusive of audience members who have disabilities, as well as strategies to approach the delivery of our content in ways that are more inclusive of everyone. We’ve talked about the why, the how, the what, and every now and then, even the when. We’ve talked about societal, commercial, financial, and even legal incentives. All in all, these posts have been building a bit of a business case around inclusion when it comes to professional speaking that I hope you’ve been enjoying.

One thing we haven’t really talked about much though is how we can take these principles, and extend them over to the social media platforms we utilize to send our message across. As you can probably imagine, for close to 7 million Canadians who have disabilities, using social media platforms on a daily basis can be a very disappointing, or even frustrating experience. Whether itʼs due to the content not being adapted to their needs or the platforms lacking accessibility features, there are many ways in which the experience can prove to be… less-than-ideal.

So, inspired in part by Alexa Heinrich‘s excellent Accessible Social Guidebook, what I’d like to offer you today are some of the most impactful ways in which you can build your brand to become more inclusive of everyone in your audience. And in so doing, increase the reach of your message by up to 40%, by acknowledging those in your audience who have disabilities, are older, or are somehow marginalized by our use of technology.

Approaching your social media strategy inclusively begins by acknowledging that your audience is much more diverse than you think! Make your posts a lot more accessible by applying these seven techniques, and help your audience enjoy a more inclusive experience as they connect with your brand.

01 – Use CamelCase formatting for hashtags

If you are concerned about making your multi-word hashtags easier to read, then you need to employ camelCase formatting to help with their legibility. Not only will you make these hashtags a lot more meaningful to those who look at them, but you will also help screen readers pronounce them more intelligibly, so they can be better understood by people who are blind, using these assistive technologies. As an added bonus, you will also avoid some potentially embarrassing misinterpretations of these hashtags. Imagine, for instance, a professional association of therapists running #meettherapists as their event’s hashtag on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. In your opinion, how do you think this association would prefer that their target audience interpret the hashtag: #MeetTherapists, or #MeetTheRapists? Never mind. Don’t answer that one.

02 – Turn visual assets to grayscale

Using colour as the only way to convey meaningful information is a surefire way to exclude those who are colourblind, have low vision, declining sight, or are generally older. You can ensure information conveyed through visual assets can be interpreted regardless of someone can perceive colours by running your visual assets (images, graphs, etc.) through a grayscale filter. In doing so, you’ll notice potential loss of information as they occur, which will enable you to fix problems and make your assets that much more inclusive of those who experience colour perception deficiencies. As an added bonus, using grayscale filters will help you spot potential colour contrast issues, where text and icons might be difficult to distinguish from their respective backgrounds. By enhancing colour contrasts, you’ll automatically make the information that much more perceivable for everyone.

03 – Provide text alternatives for images

One of the most iconic accessibility considerations, when it comes to the use of images on social media, is to provide images with text equivalents meant to be conveyed in lieu of the images for those who can’t perceive them. We’re mostly talking about audience members who are blind, or have a severe vision impairments, and very likely to rely on screen readers, text to speech, or braille display technologies. By now, most social media platforms have integrated mechanisms that allow authors to append text descriptions to the visual assets they share on their timelines. Providing these equivalents ensures a fallback for those who can’t see them, and has the added benefit of increasing the meaningfulness of visual assets from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint, as they are then supported with text.

04 – Avoid the use of tabs, spacing, emojis, and ASCII art

It’s not unusual for social media posts to try to stand out by leveraging the use of tabs, spacing, emojis, and ASCII art for forced visual effects. Granted, the results can sometimes be eye-catching, but have you ever given any thought to what it might mean to go through such posts using a screen reader? For the audience that primarily consumes social media content with their ears or fingers, the result is oftentimes horrendous, with each character being announced individually in an endless stream of gibberish. It’s great to stand out, but if you’re going to do this, make sure to convert your little pieces of digital art into images, and support them with proper text alternatives. As a collateral benefit, your posts will now contain actual text, and will be all the more relevant.

05 – Offer more accessible multimedia files for everyone

Supporting videos with synchronized captions and providing text transcripts for audio files has never been easier, with all the wonderful tools that are now at our disposal. Of course, don’t just settle for automated captions or transcript files, as these will still contain errors that can be confusing or embarrassing, but definitely leverage the power of artificial intelligence to do the initial heavy lifting! By providing AI-generated, human-edited synchronized captions for videos, as well as accurate text transcriptions for podcasts and similar audio-only files, you’re making your content a lot more inclusive for all. As an added benefit, think of all the people (including yourself) who routinely scroll through their timelines with audio/sound turned off. Every single video that has captions can then still be watched, and these people aren’t missing a beat!

06 – Leverage plain language principles

Did you know that over 48% of Canadian adults have literacy skills that fall below a high school level, which negatively affects their ability to function at work and in their personal lives? There’s usually a significant gap between those who produce content and those who consume it. Can your audience even truly connect with your brand, if your ideas and expressions are overly complex? By leveraging plain language techniques and principles, such as opting for simpler words, writing shorter sentences, or avoiding the use of passive voice in social media posts, you can propel your ideas further, so that they can more powerfully speak to the hearts and minds of your audience. As an added bonus, simpler posts can also be more reliably translated by artificial intelligence algorithms, which means that your content will more successfully travel far and wide to reach other languages and cultures.

07 – Make ambiguous links more descriptive and meaningful

As a content creator, you know that context is everything, and even more so when it comes to social media. Therefore, you should always make sure to replace meaningless link text such as “click here”, “read more” or “more info” with anchors that provide clear perspectives about the purpose of those links. Audience members who can leverage assistive technologies to extract links from their context to consult them within their tools will appreciate not having to come out of their tools to figure out what those links are about. As a collateral benefit, your links will yield a lot more SEO juice as well, if they can inform the audience directly as to what they offer. Rewriting link text in such a way is always worth it, especially on platforms where the whole point is to draw people over to your own website.

So there you have it. Seven strategies you can use today, to make your social media posts a bit more inclusive of everyone. Have you applied any of these tips to your own social media strategy? Share your experience with us using the form below, or get in touch to learn more about ways you can expand your social media outreach by up to 40% more audience members!