There are many ways to use social media platforms and many platforms out there to choose. Maybe you're already using it for personal communication, for promoting your work, for public engagement, or many other possible things. Some of the best uses of social media involve thinking outside the box, whether that is doing something unusual for the type of content or for the platform itself.

For example, some social media sites can be used to create 'choose your own adventure' stories or paths through content, using features which thread posts together. As one example, the Tower of London did a X (when it was Twitter) thread interactive game that involved being a priest trying to escape the tower. Other Twitter threads may not be interactive, but can contain bitesized narratives that may or may not be true.

Social media can also easily contain quizzes, whether these are just videos of questions (in the case of YouTube or TikTok), polls, images, or text. These can be a good way of engaging people, especially if you manage to make the quiz something everybody wants to play.

The real question is, what do you want to engage your audience with? Keep your focus on what you want them to take away from the experience and then start thinking of different ways of communicating this. Then, think about which platform your audience is on and what features you could utilise, whilst also bearing in mind you don't want to spam or annoy people.

Our guidance on using social media platforms and how to use them for research will help you make good choices when thinking about using social media more creatively:

You should also consider your balance between temporary social media content (because people often see posts randomly thanks to an algorithm deciding what they see and new posts often hide older ones) and lasting webpage content. Information that you want people to always find should be put on a webpage, even if you also post about it on social media. Webpages also make good places to showcase projects in a way that people can browse everything at once.

One way you can be more creative with social media is to think about the assets like images and videos that you create for them. Some platforms like Instagram and TikTok do have built-in editing abilities, but depending on what you're doing and what platform you're using, you might want to use other media editing tools and then add those creations to your posts.

Our tips for creating social media assets

1. When creating assets like graphics and videos for social media, you need to match your media to the platform you're using. Research the kinds of posts that are typical on that platform and what kinds of styles people are likely to engage with. If you are familiar with the platform already or can work with someone who is, that tends to make more effective material.
2. You should know the most appropriate aspect ratio to use for any image or video - basically, the height and width it should be to work best on that platform. TikTok videos and Instagram Reels need to be in a portrait orientation, typically 1080 x 1920 pixels (or a 9:16 aspect ratio), to work, but if you put that same video as a standard YouTube video (rather than a YouTube Short), it would look wrong, because those need to be landscape videos so a portrait video will have black bars added to each side to make it fit into the correct space.
3. Keep videos short! On social media platforms, especially app-based ones where people will scroll past videos like TikTok and Instagram, a short, snappy video is better than one that lasts too long, as people will get bored. Make it clear from the opening seconds why people should watch the video, with your main message of the video clearly communicated.
4. Balance video quality versus file size. You don't want a huge file size that will take ages to load, but you don't want a video that is blurry and poor quality. You might have to export your video multiple times to get the right balance.
5. When making graphics including text, keep the text simple and short. Good images can communicate more than lots of text in many cases.

Websites are pretty straightforward, right? You're on a website right now. You might not think of websites as something you can be particularly creative with, especially if you are creating a website to showcase something like a research project or piece of academic work. However, you can use a lot of the information on this guide to help you make websites that support digital creativity, from having a website that showcases digital creativity outputs like 3D models or videos to making a website that could also be an interactive story or a game.

If you are starting out making a website, you need to consider the website platform you are using. If you're making something for a University of York purpose, there's some guidance available to help you decide which platform is most appropriate:

If you're making a website to display work, Google Sites is a good option for easy, no-coding-needed websites that can have Google Drive files added to them easily. You can customise a lot of elements of a Google Site without needing to learn how to code websites, or you can use Google Sites as a starting point to make a template for the kind of website you'd like.

Our Digital Creativity Week site was created using Google Sites. It is a simple example that doesn't use many advanced features, but shows how you can display different kinds of digital creativity outputs on a single site.

When making a website to display your digital creativity projects and outputs, think carefully about structure and layout. You want something that is easy for people to navigate and doesn't look too cluttered or busy. You also want to display your outputs in the best possible light, so try to give them enough space and display them at an appropriate size.

We have more guidance on creating websites generally, too: